Aggressive Action
by Arcane Aegis
Summary: Team Seven, the archetype of a genin cell. In this iteration of a classic tale, Kakashi's 'cute little genin' are slightly less cute and a little more bloodthirsty. Now with Kushina as the overbearing mother and a little bit of [Sasuke/Ayame] to spice it up.
1. Kakashi Takes One For The Team

**Aggressive Action**

_Kakashi Takes One for the Team_

* * *

"As most of you are quite certainly aware of, it is nearing the time of the yearly genin exams."

The assembled jonin nodded in agreement, except for the apathetic Kakashi and the recently promoted Kurenai.

"We will need between ten and twelve ninja to serve as instructors, four or so of whom will stay on to train this generation of Leaf genin," Hiruzen Sarutobi informed them. "Before we begin, do any of you plan to volunteer for a genin cell?"

A few hands went up, including Kurenai's and Asuma's. The Hokage jotted their names on a note, quickly scanning the numbers before frowning. "We're a bit short," he explained, and some of the veterans groaned. Most jonin instructors were necessarily young, as some ninja who'd lived through the Third War were too unstable to be let anywhere near children. However, among those who passed Ibiki's 'sanity test', as Anko had jokingly nicknamed it when she failed by a colossal margin, it was an informal requirement to train at least one team before retiring or dying in the line of duty.

"Everyone who isn't on this list, stand up," the elder Sarutobi commanded, and begrudgingly most of the room stood in near silence, frowns on their faces.  
"Sit if you have already passed a team to chunin." Surprisingly, all but one of them collapsed thankfully back into their chairs, leaving only Kakashi on his feet. The one-eyed ninja might have frowned, or smiled, but it was hard to tell considering that three quarters of his face was covered. Inwardly, Sarutobi cursed. To back down now would look ridiculous and project favourtism, but forcing Kakashi to take another team was tantamount to consigning them to failure. Nevertheless...

"Kakashi," the Hokage decided, "you will be on this cycle for another team. Do not fail them for trivial shortcomings this time." It wasn't a suggestion or a request, it was an order.

The Hatake shrugged. "If they have what it takes, they will pass," he muttered. Translation: "Who do you think you're kidding?"

XXX

Despite his draconian pass/fail standards for new shinobi, Kakashi diligently prepared himself for the eventuality that one of his teams might make it through the Bell Test. That meant researching his students beforehand, to see what he was getting into.

Sasuke Uchiha he could understand, and even sympathize with. Clearly the Hokage wanted him to train the boy with the sharingan, whenever he experienced the emotions necessary to develop it. His past suggested psychological trauma, though his mask of indifference did a good job of hiding it.

Naruto Uzumaki, the least talented would-be ninja, had been paired with Sasuke in the time-honoured 'best and worst' combination that had landed him with Obito. Apparently, he was Minato's son, despite carrying his wife's surname. Probably the jinchuriki his former sensei created for the Nine-Tails, then. He appeared to live alone on a small stipend from the Hokage.

Sakura Haruno, easily classifiable as a fangirl. Kunoichi like her followed a predictable trend of growing out of their old crushes, becoming career chunin, and retiring to marry into a larger clan and have children. No bloodline limit, no family techniques, and no skills worth speaking of other than unusually accurate chakra control.

After a day of spying on them, he felt he had a rather clear, if stereotypical view of their personalities. Their only interaction together that he witnessed was one of Sakura hugging Sasuke, which he responded to by kicking her hard enough to send her spiralling down an alleyway, followed by Naruto smashing Sasuke on the head for daring to hit a girl and the dazed Uchiha retaliating with a vicious punch to the gut. He'd seen enough by the time the fistfight wound down to know that putting them on a team was an act of unplanned stupidity.

It was a shame that he was going to fail them (well, Naruto and Sasuke, at least), but even with all the compelling reasons to take them on as apprentice ninja, he honestly didn't consider himself to be the right man for the job. Every time he tried, he inevitably started to compare himself to his own sensei, and then he just felt inadequate as a ninja. They would do much better with another year in the academy, and with a different instructor.

With that in mind, Kakashi packed a pair of brass bells on red threads, a copy of Icha Icha Paradise and an alarm clock into his weapons' pouch, and settled down for the night.

XXX

The very next day, Kakashi cut his time at the memorial stone short to go check on the room where he had instructed Iruka to have his dysfunctional team go. It was on the third floor of a long, rust coloured building, and the wide windows of the meeting room gave an excellent view of the Hokage Monument and the low Konoha skyline. He observed them from the roof of the building opposite them, taking in their appearances.

Naruto wore the same orange outfit as before, now with a forehead protector, but the sleeves were cut raggedly short up to the elbow on both arms, revealing fuinjutsu tattoos webbing across his forearms. Kakashi was a bit surprised, but reasoned that a jinchuriki needed high-grade sealing to contain a demon. He was talking animatedly to Sasuke, who was ignoring him.

Now that he was paying attention, Sasuke was a bit off as well. Nothing noticeable at first, but every once in a while, the air around him flickered with a faint, ghostly purple. It was gone as soon as it came, cycling every thirty seconds or so, but Kakashi really didn't have an explanation for it. He could always examine it with his Sharingan later.

Lastly, Sakura was leaning against a far wall, her nose buried in a book. She was wearing a white robe that fell to the ground and pooled lazily around her feet and hands, leaving only her face visible. Her forehead protector held her length of pink hair back in a brightly coloured mop, the metal plate with the Leaf symbol facing off to one side. Not the most practical way to dress as a ninja, but what did he care?

They didn't seem rattled or even bored by his absence, so Kakashi decided to simply walk in ten minutes early and save them the wait. As he entered, he started hearing bits of their conversation.

"I'm tired of waiting for our new sensei!"

"Hn."

Why does he– _hey_, I got an idea!" Something light scraped across the floor, coming to a stop by the door.

"Naruto, don't do that."

"Aww, but _Sakura_! This is gonna be so cool!"

"He's a jonin, moron. Do you really think he'll–"

Kakashi interrupted Sasuke mid-sentence by throwing the door open. Naruto jumped backwards, his arms windmilling gracelessly as he tried and failed to keep his balance on the stool he'd been using. The blackboard eraser in his hand was telling, and when he saw him staring at it, Naruto grinned apologetically and hid it behind his back before toppling to the floor.

Sakura glanced up, noted the result of the ridiculous exchange and snickered. Sasuke just sighed and continued pretending that they didn't exist.

"My first impression of you all..." Kakashi said, "...is that I don't like you guys." Not really, he could only feel the mildness of indifference towards the children, but it was part of the routine to undermine their opinion of him, just like the perpetual lateness and blasé mannerisms.

"Good. I don't like you either," Sakura retorted, putting her book down. Kakashi noticed that the cover bore a geometric pattern that looked vaguely familiar, but the memories stayed just out of reach in his mind.

"Mmm, yes, I'll take that into consideration," he said, kicking the stool aside to survey the room. Sasuke's purple aura was coming more slowly now, only once in the last minute, and Kakashi felt vaguely relieved by that for reasons he couldn't even begin to identify.

"Meet me on the roof in five minutes and we'll get started." Executing a body flicker, Kakashi warped himself neatly to the top of the building and waited.

XXX

For someone with senses as sharp as his, Kakashi was honestly startled when he turned around to see Naruto sitting by the edge of the roof, staring out over Konoha. He hadn't even sensed his chakra signature, which had previously been bold and heady in the air. Seconds after noticing his first genin's arrival, there was the tinkling crash of a shattered window and the arrival of his second, as Sakura launched herself from the third story into the air, executing a nimble backflip and landing perfectly alongside Naruto. The blond boy looked surprised at the display of agility, and for some reason or another tried to hug Sakura, who wordlessly shrugged out of his grip. The tattoos flared with invisible chakra, and he sagged with disappointment.

Kakashi was almost disappointed when Sasuke took the stairs. He'd picked the building specifically because it had extremely inaccessible stairs, making it a pain for civilians to get to the basement or upper floors. No reason to let regular citizens stumble into Torture and Interrogation, after all. The Uchiha walked sedately over to the pair and squatted restlessly next to Naruto, all three of them facing away from Kakashi.

He coughed politely. Naruto glanced backwards, then turned around almost sheepishly, rubbing the back of his head. Sakura and Sasuke followed suit, both moving with almost unearthly grace that neither had exhibited before.

"My name is Kakashi Hatake, jonin of the Leaf," Kakashi announced. "First things first, why don't we introduce ourselves? Likes, dislikes, dreams for the future, that sort of thing. Sakura, why don't you go first?"

_'My name is Sakura Haruno, and I like SASUKE! I hate Naruto, and my dream is to–'_ Kakashi thought uncharitably, only for the pink-haired girl to snort rudely. "Yeah? You go first."

"Very well," her sensei replied. "As I said, I'm Kakashi Hatake. I have very few likes and even less dislikes, and I have some hobbies. My dream for the future is..." he trailed off.

"So all we learned is your f***ing name?" Sakura roared suddenly, coiling in on herself under the robe like an agitated serpent. "What the hell kind of introduction is that?"

"..." There were no words to describe how he felt right then. It was like Kumo had abducted her last night and replaced her with a spy of some kind. Kakashi filed that thought away for examining later._  
_

"Feh, whatever. My name is Sakura Haruno. It's not _pinkie_, it's Sakura! I like killing for the Lord and I dislike heathens and people who do stupid things to look cool. My dream is to live forever, so I can do all of the other s*** I wanna do."_  
_

"... Sasuke, why don't you go next?"

Sasuke finally sat down, looking at each of them in turn. "My name is Sasuke Uchiha. I like being the best and I dislike liars. My dream is to find the truth, and kill everyone who tries to hide it from me."

Words just didn't describe how bad of an idea he thought this was. Nevertheless, in the interest of just getting out of there before the urge to smother them in their sleep grew overwhelming, he turned to Naruto. The boy grinned from ear to ear, highlighting the dark bags under his eyes. Either he'd painted his face yesterday, or stayed up all night for a few weeks in a row.

"My name is Naruto Uzumaki!" he hollered, and a few people on the road below looked up in confusion. "I like Sakura and Sasuke and ramen and the old man and eating ramen and Ayame and ramen! I dislike waiting the three minutes for ramen to microwave, and I hate my balls."

"I'm just going to stop you there for a second," interrupted Kakashi, his visible eye half closed in a parody of happiness and contentment. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but did you just say that you dislike your balls?"

"Yeah," Naruto answered flippantly. "Why?"

"Your balls. As in, your testicles?"

Naruto pointed innocently at his crotch and gave his sensei a look that clearly said 'are you feeling alright?'. "Uh-huh."_  
_

"Okay, you can finish," Kakashi said faintly. Sakura snickered at his distress, but offered no explanation.

"My dream for the future is to be the Hokage!" Naruto cried exuberantly, standing up and thrusting his hands triumphantly in the air. Despite himself, Kakashi couldn't help but stare at the seam of his pants, as if his other eye had suddenly become a Byakugan and could divine the boy's inexplicable feelings towards his genitals.

"Sensei, don't stare at Naruto's junk!" Sakura called him out, and Kakashi flinched.

"Konoha officially does not approve of student-teacher relations," Sasuke chimed in morosely. "Ever since Orochimaru–"

Kakashi slapped himself. Hard. All three of them stared at him, and he smiled back in pleasant denial.

"Now that that's over with, here's the information for tomorrow's survival exercises," he said gamely, holding out there slips of paper to the little weir- his genin. Sasuke took one, which immediately burst into black flames in his grip, and Sakura only scanned hers briefly before muttering, "What the f***?" under her breath.

Naruto was still looking at him strangely. "Sensei, if my balls are bothering you too, I understand," he said kindly. "But, uh, maybe we could talk about that later?"

"No, no, it's fine," Kakashi pronounced, like a man walking to the gallows. "Just be at Training Ground Four tomorrow morning. "Don't... don't eat breakfast."

That said, Sakura leapt off the roof, Sasuke walked back down the stairs to street level, and while he watched the boy plod away, Naruto disappeared again. He almost felt like screaming.

XXX

"See these bells?" Kakashi asked, holding up the bane of any beginner ninja's existence. "Your job is to take these from me by any means necessary. Now, if you don't come at me with the intent to kill, there's no way you'll be able to take them, so remember that." He tried not to think about the hungry look in Haruno's eyes.

"You're a jonin," Sasuke pointed out redundantly. "Also, I think you're one of the best jonin in Konoha, from what I hear. Do we have any chance at all of getting those bells?"

"This test _does_ have a sixty-six percent fail rate," he informed them happily. "Obviously, there are two bells and three of you, so if you don't have a bell at the end, you fail! Also, if any of you happen to get a bell, you get lunch in addition to passing." As if they needed any more motivation.

"Just to make this a little more interesting, you have until noon. If I still have both bells by then, you _all_ fail!" He put the little red alarm clock down on a tree stump and set it to 12:00 p.m. "Whenever you're ready."

None of them moved when he hit the button on the alarm clock. Sasuke, Naruto and Sakura just stood there, a calm wind blowing though their clothes, which were the same as those of yesterday. The Uchiha and the Haruno appeared to be wearing different, identical clothes, while the Uzumaki just seemed to have crawled into bed without changing. Nothing happened for a few minutes.

Eventually, one of them spoke. "Well, I guess I'm going first!" said Naruto cheerfully. He walked forward, and his teammates dashed into the forest. The blond pulled out two kunai and threw one at Kakashi, who blocked it with his infamous little orange book, bought hardcover specifically to use as a weapon and piss off his potential students.

"Oi! Are you just gonna read that stupid book while I throw knives at you?" Naruto yodeled, throwing the other knife. His aim was surprisingly accurate, but it was easy enough to just avoid it by leaning a bit to the left, letting it whizz past his ear. Needed to work on his speed a bit, but otherwise it was decent enough.

"Lesson one is taijutsu," Kakashi told him, flipping Icha Icha Paradise open to page sixty.

_'Akane leaned over to pick up the fallen sheets, affording Daisuke an excellent view of her beautiful posterior. The sweat coating her body made the skin shine in the dawn light, and that made her even more desirable to him. He reached out, tracing the curves of her–'_

"Heh," he giggled, leaning back away from Naruto's high punch and jumping over the leg sweep. The boy growled, renewing his assault, but Kakashi was too much a grandmaster of combat as to allow such an untrained novice to hit him. Moving around the first strike with all of his prodigious speed, Kakashi dropped Jiraiya's masterpiece on the ground and formed a tiger seal, index fingers pointed out.

The Thousand Years of Pain technique was not actually invented by Kakashi. The only jutsu he had ever created in its entirety was the Chidori. Legend had it that the origin of the super ass-poke was Hashirama Senju, who first used it to torment his younger brother. Filled with the sort of misery that compels you to share it with the next generation, Tobirama inflicted the technique on his own genin team, including the Third Hokage. Hiruzen brought the butt-related discomfort to the sannin, specifically Jiraiya, and the Pervert had given a generous poke to Minato Namikaze. Now, properly filled with memories of his own genin exam, one could almost see the unholy light filling Kakashi's visible eye. His fingers were just long enough to reach a certain nerve in the male rectum, which, if stimulated, would make going to the bathroom uncomfortable in the extreme.

He set himself a bit behind Naruto, who was still rebalancing from the punch, and threw all of his weight behind a shot that would put Naruto out of commission. "One Thousand Years of Pain!" Kakashi shouted. And stopped involuntarily as something forced him back.

The intricate black tattoos on Naruto's arms lit up with red chakra, hot and burning through the seals like rage itself. The containers released themselves, pouring out a veritable waterfall of sand onto the grass. It blew itself into a pair of spirals, launching at Kakashi's chest and knocking him clear away from Naruto's ass. The boy looked as confused as Kakashi felt, staring down at himself like he'd just grown a third arm out of his chest.

"Wha–?" he muttered, experimentally rotating his arms and snapping the joints curiously. Kakashi got over his initial discombobulation when the mass of sand tried to pour itself down his throat. Gagging mightily, he used a quick water blast to reduce the sand to mud, which slowly retreated to a pile by Naruto's feet.

"Sand control?" he asked. "Have you ever been to Suna, or met any Sand ninja by chance? That sort of ninjutsu is rather common there, what with all the sand lying around in the desert."

I- no, no I haven't," Naruto confessed. "I don't _know_ how I did that. I'm not sure I even meant to do it."

Seeing that his student was honestly as confused as he was, Kakashi abruptly stood up and retrieved Icha Icha Paradise. "I really don't know what to say," he apologized. "Good for you with the 'intent to kill', I didn't think any of you would actually try to kill me.

XXX

Leaving Naruto in the clearing to puzzle out the meaning of the development, Kakashi moved on to his next victim: Sakura. She might have had _some_ potential, but unlike Naruto and Sasuke, she would have to earn the right to fight him. It took a bit of snooping to find her trail, but the jonin caught up with her in a different part of the woods.

She was by herself, not moving, holding a flat metal disk with both hands near her chest. The hood on her cloak was down, and her head was bowed in meditation. Sakura was murmuring something that he couldn't hear.

Rather than waste time, Kakashi delved into his repertoire of copied techniques, and dredged up one of the most effective ones: a demonic illusion. Unlike regular genjutsu, which altered the senses at the user's behest, a demonic illusion automatically provided certain effects. They usually had hand seals and didn't require much else, which meant that they were susceptible to being copied, also unlike regular genjutsu. The Hell Viewing technique sussed out the target's greatest fear and created an image of it in front of them.

"Lesson two is genjutsu," he whispered to no one in particular, and cast the illusion.

Sakura's eyes popped open, and her hands dropped to her sides, the medallion swinging. "_You_," she ground out, eyes flaming with fury. "You bastard!" She dropped to one knee, swearing under her breath, but evidently what was happening had passed, because she stood up again almost immediately.

"Come out, sensei," she called, sweeping the forest with her eyes in search of Kakashi. "Such a weak genjutsu can't entangle me!"

"Apparently," he said walking tumbling from his vantage point is a tree before her. "Now we can– whuh?"

Sakura had produced a massive scythe from nowhere, it's single blade dyed bright red and the shaft longer than she was tall. A cable connected the base of the scythe to something inside her robes. Leaping gracefully into the air, she brought the scythe down on his head with a great sweeping arc. Not pausing to think, Kakashi smashed the weapon aside, only for Sakura to use the block to realign herself in midair and strike from the side, and again from the other side, her attacks coming fast and furious despite refusing to land.

"The blessing of Lord Jashin fills me!" she screamed. "Infidels will fall under my blade!"

"I'm impressed," Kakashi commented, ducking under another swing. "Your ogamajutsu is effective, and you've got power and speed, but could you tone it down a little?"

"You told me to kill you, asshole! What the hell did you think I was going to do?"

"Scream and faint," Kakashi said bluntly. "I suppose you're a bit too crazy for that."

The next swing went just a fraction wide, and Kakashi took the opportunity to flick a shuriken into her arm. Nothing serious, just some bleeding and maybe a three-inch-long 'ninja scar', so named because of the shuriken that caused them. The weapon vanished into the folds of her sleeve, and Sakura fell back, panting with exertion.

_'That should teach her to listen to her sensei– you have to be kidding me.'_

Sakura held up the arm he'd nicked, the bloody shuriken in the other hand, and Kakashi watched in horror as her arm healed itself before his eyes. Giggling perversely, she lifted the ninja star and licked her blood off of it.

"Mmm, that hurts," she groaned in ecstasy, cutting her tongue on the razor edges.

Without further ado, Kakashi threw down a few dozen explosive tags in a circle around her feet and shunshin'd away, almost missing the petrified look on her face as the arsenal of explosives burned their way down the fuses. Maybe a bit of an overreaction, but it was part of his training to use explosive force on people who refused to die when they were killed.

XXX

Naruto looked up from his thoughts when he heard the bang. Across the training grounds, a black cloud of smoke drifted away from a nearby point in a funnel, streaming away from what was certainly the centre of a gory crater by now. Concern for the poor schmuck that had just got creamed outweighed his fear of Kakashi, so the young jinchuriki pushed aside his musings on the nature of the sand and went to investigate. The sand whisked itself back into the seals on his arms and vanished.

XXX

If, at any point, he'd been looking forward to any part of this at all, it was the fight with Sasuke. Uchiha were known for their pride in their children, so it was entirely possible that he'd learned some of the clan's ninjutsu before Itachi murdered all of them. Not only that, but apparently he was a talented ninja in his own right, if not the freak on nature that his older brother was, so maybe the rookie of the year could make up for his teammates abnormalcy.

On the other hand, there was no chance at all that he could get the bells away from him, not that Naruto had a shot either (and the less said about the pink sociopath, the better), so unless they could get their teamwork together, they were history.

Sasuke was walking by the edge of a lake when Kakashi caught up to him, whistling tunelessly. The purple haze was nowhere to be found, for which Kakashi was grateful, but at the same time he looked a little disinterested in the bell test.

"Sensei," he said, not looking up from his own reflection in the lake, "you used to be a member of ANBU, didn't you?"

"That's hardly relevant," the white-haired man replied.

"What did you think of my brother?" Sasuke pressed. "Was he a nice person? Cruel? Was he really a pacifist like people tell me? Was he insane?"

"Not really, no, yes, probably... Do you want a bell or not?"

Sasuke looked at him with black eyes, which bled over into red, three tomoe rotating clockwise in each of them, and then the design changed again. Thin black pinwheels, a black iris and red sclerae; whatever it was, it was not the sharingan.

Kakashi didn't have time to ponder this new development when something big and purple came straight at him. He leapt on top of it, landing on the wrist joint of a titanic ethereal arm. Sasuke doubled over in pain, and a second arm joined the assault, the two of them smashing at Kakashi like a frustrated man swatting at a fly. Logic had no place in the fight anymore, if there was any to begin with, after the second arm grew yet _another_ arm, which joined the first.

"You three really need to stop surprising me, you know," Kakashi growled, readjusting his headband so as to uncover his right eye. He felt the drain immediately as Obito's eye started sucking at his chakra reserves. "That isn't a technique a genin should know..."

Granted, Konoha genin shouldn't know how to control sand, or how to heal themselves immediately, but spontaneously creating a new kekkei genkai? That was just over the metaphorical line.

Sasuke gave him the evil eye between gasps, and the purple chakra construct vanished. The Uchiha formed a few hand seals and exhaled, and a stream of liquid fire spread at Kakashi, who nodded in satisfaction. _That_ was what he'd been expecting from the twelve-year-old. "Good, good, but you're still missing something."

He vanished, the earth swallowing him up and breaking apart under fingers. Kakashi half-swam, half-floated underneath Sasuke, his very essence concealing itself, and with a sharp tug on his ankle he was joined in the ground.

"Nice try, Sasuke," he said maliciously, surfacing just to relish the look of hatred on the boy's face. Maybe that was a mistake, though, because as soon as he looked directly at those not-sharingan in a fit of curiosity, the world around him disappeared. Instead, there were red clouds in a black sky, with violet trees waving in the stiff wind. Sasuke himself was standing, while Kakashi was sucked into the ground up to his neck. He tried to move, but the earth turned to granite where he touched it.

Sasuke, his eyes hidden by his bangs, smirked. "What are you trying to teach us?" he asked idly.

"Well, this was supposed to be ninjutsu, but apparently you've got that covered." This day just kept getting better and better, didn't it? His sharingan wasn't seeing through the genjutsu, and he'd gotten out of practice with dispelling these things.

With that, Sasuke wound up and kicked Kakashi in the head with all the force he could dream of. Despite knowing intellectually that it was just an illusion, getting kicked in the face still hurt like a sonofabitch. It was all he could do not to scream in pain, but thankfully the discordant sensation was too much for Sasuke's control, and the illusion broke.

Somehow, while he had just been standing there, Naruto had take both bells. Sakura had one arm slung over his shoulders, and together they had stolen the objectives from the incapacitated Kakashi. Technically, that was a pass, but damned if Kakashi was going to have anything to do with these brats after this.

"Congratulations," he said wearily. "Naruto, you pass. Who gets the second bell?"

"Sakura!" said Naruto immediately, passing the other bell off to the dead girl walking. She looked at it for a second, then hobbled over to Sasuke and set it down next to his head. "You have it," she said sweetly. "Jashin will reward me for inflicting you on the world."

Well, that met the teamwork requirement for sure. Kakashi seethed, but there was only one thing for it: disobey the Hokage and fail them for trivial reasons. Again moving with preternatural quickness, he snatched the one bell off the ground and the other from Naruto's hand, much to the jinchuriki's dismay.

"You can't f***ing do that!" Sakura burst, and Kakashi rolled his eyes.

_'Silly children, I'm a ninja! I can do whatever I want.'_

"I'm sorry," he feigned sadness, "but unless you have the bells at noon–"

Somewhere, on a tree stump in the middle of the woods, an alarm clock rang.

XXX

None of them had done anything spectacularly wrong, so Kakashi arbitrarily decided to tie Sakura to the tree stump. Partly because she was the one without a bell at the end, and partly because she annoyed the hell out of him. Right now, she was swearing vengeance against the Hatake family and just generally being loud, so he left her to it while Naruto and Sasuke ate their lunches.

He was especially pleased that none of them were sharing lunches or untying Sakura, although he suspected that they were equally afraid of the girl. At least he had a name to go by now: Jashin. Probably a god or a spirit of some kind, but he had a feeling that he'd met one of his worshippers before.

After lunch, they would fail. It was as simple as that, and afterwards Kakashi could forget all about them. Even now, Akane's sexy, sexy ass called to him from within Icha Icha Paradise, and it was only a matter of time before he could go back to his own private world.

"Hatake, sir." The speaker was a youngish ninja, probably a chunin. "Lord Hokage requests your presence in his office immediately. He wants to discuss something with you."

"I'm watching my genin," Kakashi said irritably, "can this wait?"

"No, sir."

"Very well." He bounded off, hoping against hope to finish the conversation before failing the team.

XXX

Sarutobi was sitting on a tatami mat when Kakashi arrived, his fingers wrapped around a glass orb about the size of a softball. Whatever was inside, it obviously held his attention, but Kakashi couldn't actually see for himself.

"Sit down, Hatake," the Hokage told him softly. Kakashi sat on the floor, twitching impatiently.

"Izumo was just telling me about your genin team," Sarutobi said conversationally. "He says that they were able to take both bells shortly before noon. That's impressive, isn't it?"

"With all due respect, Lord Hokage, they did not exhibit the teamwork skills necessary to succeed in the ninja world."

"You intend to send them back to the Academy?"

"If they do not pass, then yes."

"I specifically told you not to fail them, Kakashi, unless they were clearly unfit for duty. From what I've seen, that isn't the case."

"Hiruzen–"

"Pass them."

"Excuse me?" Kakashi asked incredulously.

"Pass them," Sarutobi repeated. "That is an order. The bell test forces cooperation, but its design also accomodates unusually talented prospects. They are more than ready, and if you find fault with their teamwork, it's your job to remedy that. Understood?"

XXX

When Kakashi got back, Sasuke was brooding, and Sakura and Naruto seemed to have joined him. He really didn't need this kind of stress on his plate, but treason was such a pain...

"Thanks for putting my arm back on," Sakura muttered.

"Don't mention it. How are you still alive?" the blonde boy asked.

"I don't die."

"Good to know," Sasuke said to himself.

"I've got news!" he said with forced joviality. "You pass!"

"... What?" Naruto deadpanned. "I thought you were giving us a second chance after lunch."

"You followed orders, that's good enough for me. Go home, meet me here tomorrow, and feel free to abandon your careers as ninja. No takers? Figures."

Despite it only being about one in the afternoon, Kakashi went home for a beer. Behind him, he could hear Naruto screaming to the heavens about his success and being 'one step closer to being Hokage!', while Sakura threatened to kill them if they didn't untie her.

He was _so_ not ready.

* * *

**This was sort of inspired by **_'A Freak, A Creep & A Psychopath'_** by Legendary Legacy, so check that out if you want something way better than this. To clarify what just happened, Naruto is the Ichibi jinchuriki, Sakura is a Jashinist, and Sasuke has the mangekyo sharingan. The specifics will be written in later.**

_Up Next:_

_Team 7 meets up at the bridge, and Kakashi has a small meltdown._


	2. The Bridge Incident

**Aggressive Action**

_The Bridge Incident_

* * *

Naruto stumbled home in a daze, his stomach full of Kakashi's tasteless bento and thoughts rippling in his mind. Surprisingly, he could actually _feel_ the sand in the storage fuinjutsu that covered his skin, a feeling similar to having a full gut. However, only the barest amount of control was afforded to him over the movements of the sand. It took a bit of experimenting to even figure out how to open the seals in the first place: he had to use chakra, but it had to be 'angry' chakra, killing chakra. Then the sand fell out in motionless piles, like the desert at the bottom of an hourglass, until he could no longer hold up his killing intent.

So with that in mind, Naruto considered what to do about the development. He didn't have the fine control necessary to make the sand dance to his tune, which left one of two options. Either he could change that, or try to hunt down a shinobi who could teach him sand manipulation techniques. They were possible; after all, he had somehow managed to create clones made of sand using the shadow clone seals. A bit more useful than the average clone, considering that it served as a distraction, an attack tool and a trap.

On the other hand, Naruto had to admit that he had no clue where to find a Suna ninja just vacationing in Konoha, and the shadow-turned-sand clones were a bit of a dead end. That left training up his chakra control, and if there was one thing Naruto knew how to do, it was train until he dropped dead or mastered whatever technique he was trying to learn.

_'I wonder if Iruka would tell me how to do it,'_ he wondered idly. _'I guess it's as good a place to start as any. He doesn't leave until four, plenty of time to go for ramen with him.'_

With that in mind, he tossed on a dirty white shirt, threw the mostly uneaten lunch into his (unplugged) refrigerator, and began the relatively short walk to the ninja academy.

XXX

Sasuke was a bit numb, to be honest. He'd only just found out how to use his sharingan, and now his eyes felt like they were on fire. Words could not convey exactly how much agony his red-rimmed eyes were pouring into his skull, like a bucket full of angry bees and molten glass. Maybe it would suffice to say that for the first time in years, he no longer felt like tearing his brother a new one, as strange as that may seem.

Time seemed to slow to a crawl as the surviving Uchiha dragged himself through his front door. He _didn't_ want to kill Itachi. That was disturbing on so many levels. Sasuke's train of thought ground to a screeching halt before swerving off the tracks and crashing through the underbrush of his mind. In order to reconstruct his worldview, his fragile psyche began to painstakingly assemble a theory in which Itachi was coincidently _also_ responsible for this new headache.

Possibility one: Itachi was using some kind of long-range torture ninjutsu for his own perverted pleasure. A bit unlikely, given that torture techniques tended to be less localized, although it was possible this one was developed for use against dojutsu users.

Possibility two: Itachi had done something to his eyes the last time he saw him, designed to react when he unlocked his sharingan. Slightly more plausible, but there remained the fact that Sasuke had created a massive violet skeleton out of pure chakra. If nothing else, that was _not_ a sharingan ability. Maybe his mother had her own kekkei genkai and passed that on to her sons. Wait, Mikoto was his father's cousin, so maybe not.

_'Don't think about that,'_ Sasuke urged himself, forcibly ignoring images of Mikoto and Fugaku Uchiha committing incest.

Possibility three: Itachi's comment about 'eyes like his' had some merit. Sasuke liked this idea the best, because it meant that he was _finally_ making some progress towards being able to avenge his clan. However, from what he could gather, Itachi had slaughtered all of his relatives to _get_ the super-genjutsu he'd used to make Sasuke relive the massacre. Did that mean he was as bad as his brother?

Unnoticed by Sasuke, his hands began to shake, his fists clenched so tightly that the fingernails were drawing blood from his palm.

Almost enraged, yet not knowing why, Sasuke shut his mangekyo sharingan off with superhuman effort, relishing the cool release as well as hating the way the world fell out of glorious, sharp focus. He needed to find what passed for his happy place before the neighbors started complaining about the killing intent again.

XXX

It was the next morning, and already she was restless.

Sakura was on the hunt, and the Forest of Death knew it. The wildlife was conspicuously absent whenever she neared, and even the predators gave her a wide berth as she circled in wide, spiral tracks around the massive foliage and mutant patches of swamp.

There was something specific she was tracking, but she couldn't put her finger on it. The giant scythe lay discarded under her bed, hidden under stacks of frilly pink knickknacks, and the pink-haired monster was armed with only her superhuman sense of smell and industrious reflexes. Right now, the scent lay cold, but in a certain direction the particles of fur and scat grew denser, and Sakura's psychotic grin grew feral. She dropped to all fours, lowering her nose right to the freezing mud-caked bark to pick out the individual fragrances.

_'Rosemary, pine, spearmint, __**cat**__.'_ She grimaced momentarily. The heady concoction stood out like a splash of red on a white canvass, bloody like the hands of a daimyo's wife. The comparison clicked in her mind, and suddenly Sakura was off like a rocket, bounding off of trees and shrubs with both hands and feet, almost flying in her haste to catch the fleeing creature.

As she neared, the little beast started yowling in sheer, animalistic terror, and she positively laughed with dark delight.

"Run!" she urged viciously, putting on a burst of speed to round off a corner and cut it off. Shrieking again, her prey went into an uncontrolled tumble as it struggled to right itself. Sakura obliged, waiting for seconds that stretched on and on for her prey to recover its balance, and then the chase was on again. Determined to make the hunt last longer, Sakura allowed it to believe it might outstrip its hunter, and then cornered it with one deft lunge and a roar laced with traces of madness.

Cornered, it released its bladder in one last-ditch effort to scare off the predator, but Sakura was having none of that. She grabbed the tiny thing by the scruff of its neck and held it close to her face. Predictably, it lashed out with its hind legs, scratching frantically at Sakura's face. Little lines of dotted blood popped up on her face, but the cuts sealed themselves instantly with a wisp of Jashin's intervention. Smelling of fresh blood and piss, the pink-haired cultist laughed.

"Lord Jashin, accept my sacrifice!" she shouted into the empty air, jabbing her bare fingers into the cat's gut. The blood ran out slowly, and Sakura licked a few droplets off.

"Mmm, salty," she purred, releasing the pet. The beribboned housecat shot off quickly, but the damage was done: the white markings of the death god were flitting across Sakura's skin, dripping from her robes to form an inverted triangle within a circle beneath her feet. With hands trembling from anticipation, she drew her sheathed tanto and aimed it for her heart.

XXX

Kakashi looked down at his students, feeling a little unnerved. The bridge he'd originally designated as his meeting point for them was on fire. The fire was black, and it wasn't spreading, and Sasuke looked far too satisfied about that for it to be a coincidence. His eyes were the same as they were yesterday, red on black with three ovals encircling a lotus design around the pupil. Casually tilting his forehead protector backwards, Kakashi observed that the ruby chakra of sharingan abilities was present in unusually high concentrations in Sasuke's new bloodline limit. He was humming under his breath about skinning a weasel, and stifled a laugh every time a section of the bridge crumbled into the water.

Sakura was right next to him, practically draped over Sasuke's shoulder and talking loudly about what she would do with him when they were alone. Kaksahi merrily tuned it out after "… tie your hands behind your back so you can't stop me from…" failed to get a reaction from either him or Naruto. Instead, he focused with mounting horror on the venomous vines of chakra twisting through her body. They swirled around her internal organs and shot thin spines into her every cell. His sharingan could see in intimate detail every tissue's unholy cocoon, and he could only surmise at the pain she must have been in.

Naruto was almost tame in comparison. He was simply standing under the shade of the oak tree next to where the new bridge would have to be built (Sasuke actually giggled when the last flaming piece toppled into the river, and Sakura sighed dreamily). Every once in a while he tried putting one foot on the bark, but then he would take it off again and shake his head. Kakashi couldn't find anything out of the ordinary with him, so he pulled his forehead protector back down to cover Obito's eye again.

"Good morning, my cute little genin!" Kakashi sang, jumping into their midst with a poof of smoke. Instantly, Sakura was bounding after him, producing her scythe from God-knows-where and jamming it into his kidneys. She yanked back on the blade… and Kakashi's shadow clone disappeared with an identical smokescreen.

"Now, now, today isn't the day for beating up your poor old jonin sensei," Kakashi said sadly, managing to retain a calm composure. Inside, he was sweating bullets. Sakura was almost as fast as _he_ was, and coming from the student of the late Minato 'Yellow Flash' Namikaze, that was saying something. He'd barely managed to create the appropriate clone and swap it for himself in time to avoid getting skewered.

"Aww, I wanna know what your blood tastes like," Sakura whined, reluctantly lowering the tip of the scythe and loosening the cord at the end.

"You smell kinda bad, Sakura," Naruto finally managed to say, looking like it was a topic he'd been avoiding for some time now. "What happened?"

She shrugged. "I forgot to cook breakfast. Had to eat it really rare. Couldn't even get any barbeque sauce on that stringy little bitch, tasted like s***."

Kakashi and Naruto stared at her. "What?" she demanded. "I was f***ing out of time, okay? I wouldn't have hurried if I knew this bastard was going to be thirty minutes late."

_'Only thirty minutes?'_ Kakashi thought, horrified. _'Oh God, I'm giving them the wrong impression already!'_

"Whatever," said Sasuke. "I would appreciate it if you never touched me again, if this is what will happen every time." When Sakura had leveraged herself off to attack Kakashi, the massive red patch on the front of her robes was revealed, as was the stain that had dripped onto Sasuke's tunic. It looked rather like she'd been stabbed two or three times in the chest…

"I think I'm going to be sick," admitted Naruto, his voice faint. "Can you two maybe wash Sakura off while I go, uh…" He gagged, abandoning all pretense of interest and running around to the other side of the oak. Retching noises filled the morning air, and both Kakashi and Sasuke shot Sakura dirty looks.

"… What?" the pink haired girl asked, raising her hands as her male teammates advanced on her with matching evil glares. "This is a really s***ty time to start showing teamwork," she muttered.

Once again drawing on the sort of agility and speed typically reserved for the S-class missions of his ANBU days, Kakashi snatched her scythe away, pounding the long blade into the soft earth before Sakura could react. Sasuke, meanwhile, drew two kunai and sliced her robes from neckline to waist, dragging the fabric down to her ankles with a few deft movements. Underneath, Sakura was wearing a white undershirt with a gash over the heart and panties embroidered with little hearts. The bloodstain streaked through her undergarments, ending at the tip of her underwear.

"Oh," she muttered. Her right hand twitched, but her tanto and the spool for her scythe cable had been torn off with her clothes. A wicked gleam entered her eyes.

"See something you like, Sa-su-keeeee?" she inquired seductively. One of the Uchiha's eyes twitched, but before he could do anything Kakashi caught one ankle and the opposite shoulder in a judo throw that Sasuke managed to record with the sharingan, and later use against hundreds of sparring partners. Screaming obscenities, Sakura was gracelessly hurtled backwards into the river. She landed with a splash and disappeared.

"That could have been much more efficient if we'd told her to wash herself," commented Sasuke.

"True, but this way was much more amusing," Kakashi countered. "And now we can clean the rest of her clothes." With a flourish he held up the bloody undergarments, leaving Sasuke to wonder what Sakura would do when she found out he'd seen her naked. Either the traditional reaction, the sort Jiraiya teased out of woman all over Fire Country every day, or one that involved flaunting her newfound indestructibility, endless stamina and tiny breasts. He shuddered violently.

Incidently, many years later, Sasuke would begin to mysteriously find his opponents' underwear in his weapons pouch. Until his speed reached that level, however, he would simply assume that Kakashi's taijutsu was faulty, and try not to be bothered by his bewildering, clumsy attempts to steal people's clothing in the middle of heated sparring matches.

"When I get out of_*glub*_here you two are f***ing DEAD!_*glub* _DO YOU HEAR_*glub* _ME, F***ERS?" Sakura screamed, her minimal swiming training keeping her afloat for scant seconds. With that, Sakura's bobbing head vanished beneath the waves like the periscope of a sinking submarine.

"Are you worried–"

"Nope!"

"But she'll–"

"Don't be ridiculous!"

"Don't be what?" Naruto asked blearily, wandering back into their midst with little splotches of vomit crusting his lips and forearms, and sand leaking from his pant legs. The orange was now more of a dusty brown, and Kakashi found himself wondering if he should give his other student a bath too.

"Kakashi, why did you slap yourself again?"

"I- I don't have to justify myself to _you_," the silver haired man replied petulantly, feeling unsettled by the fact that he was arguing like a six-year-old and making Naruto look mature by comparison. Sighing, he revved up his chakra system and poured a few grams of aerosol methane into his lungs.

"Great Fireball technique," he murmured, exhaling a weak blast of fire that enveloped Sakura's robe. The flames rose to a decent height, and he tossed the undershirt and panties on the pile to burn as well.

"Sensei!" Naruto shouted, scandalized. "You can't just set fire to Sakura's clothes! That's just mean!"

"Do you want me to throw you naked in a river too?" Kakashi asked menacingly, rounding on the Uzumaki with feverish malice in his eyes. "Because I can arrange that, you know. I'll tell the Hokage that I was teaching you how to walk on water and you slipped. Genin fall in all the time, you know, and it's such a shame those cheap clothes fell apart in the water..."

"I wanna learn how to walk on water!" Naruto declared, presumably missing most of his instructor's sentence and only hearing the magic words Iruka had mentioned in his brief discussion on chakra control training exercises. Water walking was an advanced version of the indispensable wall climbing technique, and in addition to being a valuable tool in its own right, was also a way to hone one's mastery of their chakra system. Iruka seemed to think that it should be part of the academy curriculum, but Naruto only knew one person who could even consider trying it, and she was knee-deep in a riverbed right now.

Kakashi twitched, a twitch that Sasuke knew well. It was the twitch of the mentally unstable, the twitch of a man whose heart and mind were so conflicted that one of them would have to snap. It suited the Hatake _much_ more than Itachi.

"Let's begin your training," said Kakashi. Naruto frowned, just before Kakashi executed yet another seamless sequence of judo techniques, throwing Naruto over his hip with a similar trajectory to Sakura's. Shouting, the genin was sent tumbling into the river without most of his clothes on. Kakashi hadn't managed to disassemble Naruto's underwear, nor had he pulled them off, so the blond boy still had a semblance of dignity even as he was sent to an ignoble end.

Sasuke was mesmerized by the perfection of Kakashi's movement. In the years to come, more and more of his foes would end up inexplicably naked, and he would be helpless to stop himself for want of the reason.

Humming his own little tune about skinning fish and cherry blossoms, Kakashi inspected Naruto's bargain-bin quality orange outfit. "Disgusting," he judged gleefully, and threw the lot of it on the bonfire.

XXX

It took Sakura a few seconds after sinking for the final time to realize she was stark naked. She shrugged, deciding that since nobody was watching it didn't matter. Jumping as high as possible, the weight of the water above her shoved the Jashinist back down to the muck below, and this time it sucked at her feet until she was in to her knees.

"F***!" she cried, a flurry of air bubbles escaping her mouth and carrying her vulgarity away in the current. Not breathing wouldn't stop her, or for that matter neither would breathing in water, but it would sure as hell slow her down. Involuntarily, Sakura sucked in a deep breath, and was surprised to find that her immortality extended to asphyxiation as well. Jashin's power crafted chemical oxygen and injected it directly into her heart, exhuming carbon dioxide from her pores.

It was a novel feeling, with the water reaching all of her intimate places and tickling her skin, but enough was enough: Kakashi needed to die.

Sakura reached down to clear the debris free, ripping away clots of mud and weeds, heedless of how they tore at her skin. There was a good foot or so of muck to be dislodged, so she bent over and attacked it with gusto.

It was only her sixth sense that saved her from having her back snapped in two like a twig (like _that_ would stop her!) by something else launched into the river. Sakura bent herself sideways and hugged one ankle to avoid being hit by Naruto, who rocketed into the mud within arm's reach of her. He was almost naked as well, though Sakura noticed that he still wore underwear.

Self preservation beat out curiosity, and she quickly returned to digging herself out of the silt without paying him much mind.

XXX

Now, Naruto could hold his breath for almost three minutes, give or take thirty seconds. In this case, he sincerely hoped for those extra thirty seconds. Before him, in all of her pristine, bathed glory was the girl he'd pined for fruitlessly for half of his life. Not paying any mind to him at all, Sakura's pink hair flew in a candy-coloured corona around her torso and between her thighs. And she was naked, too. Naruto was torn between the little demonic voice that riveted his attention to her butt, thrust upwards as she worked at the binding debris around her ankles, and the much quieter angelic voice that pointed out that he was quickly running out of oxygen.

_'Do you _want_ to die down here?' _asked the angelic facsimile of the jinchuriki floating above his shoulder.

_'Well, maybe he does, if it means seeing _that_ before he goes!' _countered the demon.

The angel slapped his face with his palm in frustration._ 'Hurry up and get out of here!' he_ squeaked.

Sakura shifted a little bit, and the giant mop of pink hair, which had previously censored her torso and groin, was blown behind her head.

_'Oh yeah, just look at her!' _the devil cried lustily._ 'There's no way you can lose her to someone like Sasuke!'_

Naruto found himself quite agreeing. Apparently, she had naturally pink hair. In fact, he was only able to tear his eyes away when he noticed his nose was bleeding profusely. A trail of red liquid stretched from his face off into the water, and it seemed some of it was going to reach Sakura.

_'Nice going, moron,'_ chided the angel.

XXX

Sakura was almost done when she froze, partially resuming her hunter mindset. Her nostrils widened as her water-filled lungs brought in another gulp of the river, and with it came a faint trace of blood. _'Prey!'_ her mind screamed, and she straightened out to take advantage of whatever dead fish Jashin had thrown her way.

Instead, she found Naruto, staring at her ass shamelessly with only a hint of a nosebleed to show his arousal. That, and the fact that his underwear had a bulge in it the size of her fist. Her first reaction was one of surprise (_'Holy s***, what a monster!'_), followed shortly by indignant rage. If human vocal cords could function underwater, she would have screamed implications against her teammate's ancestry, but as it was she opted to grab him by the throat, pulling him out of the mud and pushing her deeper into it, and tightened.

It was kind of sad that Naruto took as long as he did to stop ogling her butt. When he finally noticed that she was trying to kill him, he started flailing his arms wildly, trying to knock her hands off.

It was when she hauled her right leg out of the silt, her knee raised to perform the oldest and most reliable method of female self-defence, that something happened. An explosion of white mud rippled out from Naruto, propelling him out of the water and swarming around Sakura like a horde of angry insects. The sand washed down her throat and into her eyes, winding around her tightly like a blanket made of chakra and murder. And then it squeezed. Hard.

XXX

It had been two minutes since Kakashi had sent Sakura off to bathe herself, and was getting a little worried. Did the academy still teach ninja how to swim? They couldn't have it both ways; if the kids couldn't walk on water, they had to be able to swim. Sasuke seemed content to wait, and Kakashi could feel his madness gradually slip away, so it seemed there was nothing else to do. Truth be told, the jonin was a bit worried what Sarutobi would do to him when he found out. Hiruzen was fairly level-headed, as far as Hokage went, but even he had a limit. Throwing two students naked into a body of water was probably beyond the pale.

Then, Naruto was catapulted out of the water, a trail of white sand streaming behind him. He landed on the bank, rubbing his throat with one hand and trying to recall the sand with the other. Then the river turned red. Kakashi immediately smelled the blood spilling from his sole female student, and he dived into the river to rescue her. Naruto was screaming about not meaning to do it, until Sasuke gave him a rather hard shake to shut him up. Sadly, he tripped over something.

Kakashi was finding it rather hard to get through the water. The sand was inevitably making the riving into a sludge, which inevitably dyed red by Sakura's bloody entrails as she fought a losing battle with Naruto's sand. He covered his eyes with one hand as he swam, until he was roughly over where Sakura sank. Kakashi reached down, grabbing the first solid thing he could find, and pulled.

_'Just a branch,' _he thought, as Sakura's severed arm went flying towards the shore. He reached down, fingers brushing something a bit more solid, and this time he was sure he'd rescued her. Literally jumping out of the water, Kakashi stood on the surface holding what had to be the most gruesome thing he'd ever seen. Sakura, or what was left of her, was missing both legs and her left arm, blood slicking her entire body and most of her saviour's uniform. Her torso was perforated with holes the size of her wrist, showcasing internal organs Kakashi was previously unaware that humans possessed. Half of her face was a putrid, crushed mess, the eye reduced to a glob of white jelly in a mulch of flesh and bone. He rather felt like emptying his own stomach right then.

Moments earlier, Sasuke was shaking Naruto out of his trance when the wet ground made him slip. Both fell over, Sasuke landing on his teammate with a slight grunt and a wince of pain. Naruto stared up at him, eyes filled with confusion, until they hardened. "If you kiss me again, I will rip your head off," he promised, and Sasuke nodded slowly. Then there was a wet flopping sound as something landed next to them. A human arm, to be precise. There was a Leaf headband wrapped loosely around the wrist, and the red fabric suggested that it was none other than Sakura's. They stared at it.

"AAAAAAAAGH!" screamed Naruto.

"AAAAAAAAGH!" screamed Sasuke.

Meanwhile, Kakashi watched in amazement as Sakura's face slowly knitted itself back together, the vines of darkness he'd witnessed earlier proturuding from her skin and regenerating the old cells, pushing everything back into place. Sakura's right arm came up shakily, and pressed the outermost part of her eye socket back into place. It clicked there and stayed in place, and her arm fell back down, exhausted from the effort.

The screaming of his other students alerted him to a problem, but not one that could override the flashback he was having of Obito's dying moments, so instead he sent a shadow clone.

XXX

"Hey," said Kakashi's clone. "What seems to be the problem?"

Sasuke looked up and saw a towering giant with one red eye, covered in blood, and he panicked. Just a little bit, mind you.

"Amaterasu!" he shouted desperately. Every square inch of the shadow clone caught fire, and it took surprisingly long for the copy to stop yelling in pain and stumble to the river, where it tried to extinguish itself. Unbeknownst to either Sasuke or Kakashi, the black flames were undeterred by water, and so it simply rolled around a bit in the shallows before it died.

The real Kakashi, the one holding Sakura, was instantly assaulted with memories of dying in a horrible fire that refused to be doused with water, and the pain was real enough to almost make him drop his badly mutilated cargo. There was indeed a fumble, and Sakura somehow drudged up the willpower to flip him the bird with her good hand, but at least he didn't drop her again.

The sand, which was bogged down by becoming mud at the most inopportune time, realized that its master was in an environment causing elevated stress. This stress stemmed from the image of Kakashi, and so this simplistic thinking process brought it to the conclusion that Kakashi was the new source of Naruto's woes, and as such it assembled to crush him.

This time, Kakashi was ready, and without thinking he ran off a fire release with low range and intense heat, and then sprinted towards the edge. Breathing heavily, he deposited Sakura's body next to Naruto and Sasuke, and turned to face the sand. Fortunately, the sight of Sakura dying made Naruto faint, and so the sand no longer had enough will to power it. Two tons of sand and a glass statue were whisked into Naruto's storage seals, and Kakashi decided it was safe enough to go cry.

Sasuke ran his eyes over Sakura, memorizing every inch of her perfect form with his sharingan. Saving it for a rainy day to cheer him up, when she became too much of a bitch for him to handle. Then he could bring up fond memories of their first day as genin. Once again, his kekkei genkai backfired, as every time he did so it was accompanied by the image of him almost kissing Naruto.

XXX

"These itch, you bastard," Sakura muttered halfheartedly. Their sensei had produced some extra flack jackets and ninja pants when Naruto complained about his lack of clothing, and they were quickly discovering that there was a reason you were supposed to wear shirts under the kevlar material. Only Naruto was wearing the pants, because she no longer had anything under her navel. Kakashi had quickly bandage it to stop her intestines from spilling out, but Sasuke couldn't help but think it was a serious deleriction of duty that she hadn't been hauled off to the emergency room immediately.

"Can we go get some lunch before we start training?" asked Naruto. Apparently, his coping mechanism was to ignore the problem, so Sakura's lack of legs barely registered with him. "We can go get some ramen, and then you can teach us all of your cool ninja abilities! Like water walking, and tree climbing, and teleporting!"

Kakashi, who was now the proud owner of a nuclear headache, had a brief vision of two dangerous, out of control genin and a homicidal maniac walking/crawling into Ichiraku's Ramen, and immediately nixed the idea.

"Sorry, kid," he replied, rubbing Naruto's head fondly, "we're going right into missions."

Naruto's eyes went wide, sparkles shining in their cerulean depths. "Woohoo!" he cried, much to the annoyance of the other three, "I'm really a ninja now! What're we doing first, huh?"

To their surprise, Kakashi already had three mission scrolls. He passed one to each of them and waited gleefully for their disappointed faces. Naruto dashed off as soon as he read the contents of the scroll, Sakura didn't read hers at all, and Sasuke's face remained neutral.

"How the hell am I supposed to do this without f***ing legs?" Sakura asked bluntly. "It's going to be another hour before I can walk right."

"Figure it out," the younger Hatake said pleasantly. "I have things to do today." He produced Icha Icha Violence and walked away.

Sakura turned to Sasuke, a coy smile already on her face. "Oh, can you help me with– Sasuke?"

The penultimate Uchiha was gone. He'd left shortly after Naruto, willing to do anything it took to get this farce of a genin cell to actually accomplish something. The scroll was red, unlike the other two, and it had the daimyo's official seal in the wax holding it shut. It probably paid a good bit more than the average D-rank mission, then. Without a hint of trepidation, Sasuke opened the scroll.

The Tora mission was a classic, originating with the pet cat of the Nidaime Fire Daimyo's wife, Tora. Despite the name of the mission, Lady Shijimi's pet was actually Tora IV, the great granddaughter of the original Tora. She was a heavyset tabby with thick brown fur and a velvet red ribbon tied to one ear, and a temper to match her namesake.

As of that morning, she was also dead. Sasuke had no way of knowing this, but he would eventually run into the dead cat somewhere in the Forest of Death, after dodging the attacks of giant bears, mutant sloths and an amorous plant-thing. It gave him great pleasure to dump the corpse into Shijimi's arms and walk away, listening to her sobs.

XXX

"May I have a word with you, Hatake?" insisted the Hokage. It was a testament to his character that Kakashi didn't run screaming from his employer when he heard his voice, though it was a near thing. Hiruzen's tone was stone cold and merciless, promising punishment if the conversation to come didn't satisfy him.

"Of course, Lord Sarutobi," replied Kakashi. It was a bad sign that the Hokage wasn't in his office. That usually meant someone had died, or someone was about to die...

"I've been following your progress with your new team," Sarutobi said casually. "It seems that Iruka was correct in assigning them to you, as he had reasoned that you would be the most capable of training them."

He walked right up to Kakashi and leaned into him, lowering his voice to barely above a whisper. "You threw them in a river?"

Kakashi winced. "Yes, well, Sakura was covered in blood and it was making Naruto uncomfortable, so–"

"It is her responsibility to wash her blood off. Not yours. What were you thinking?" hissed the Hokage.

"That was _her_ blood?"

"Irrelevant," the God of Shinobi deflected. "You will teach them until they are prepared for ninja life, and then you may return to your previous schedule. There _will not _be a repeat of what has occurred today, do I make myself clear?"

XXX

Just as Sasuke had lowered his face towards Naruto's, right before what would have been their second kiss, the sand stopped. The autonomous force controlling one of the deadliest weapons in Konoha debated tearing the Uchiha to shreds for daring to molest her son again.

Then Kushina Uzumaki's spirit decided to let the show go on, because it was too damn funny watching the kids squirm.

* * *

**I really apologize for the wait on this story, but here's chapter two! I didn't expect it to turn out like this, but there you have it. To clarify, Naruto didn't actually have an erection while he was watching Sakura. That was something else...**

_Up Next:_

_Team Kurenai, Team Asuma, and Team Guy join in the fun. Hopefully there are no fatalities._


	3. Sharing The Misery

**Aggressive Action**

_Sharing The Misery_

* * *

Sasuke wanted, no, _needed_ answers. His new eyes were irritating in more ways than one, and that just couldn't go on. Certainly having the sharingan was an improvement over _not_ having it, but he didn't remember his father ever mentioning that it would hurt, nor that there were a host of other abilities that Uchiha could use.

There was no way he was just going to tell the Hokage what had happened to his eyes. Lord Sarutobi undoubtedly knew already, and if he hadn't called Sasuke in for an audience yet, it wasn't going to happen. Asking for one would lead to frustration and a waste of time, so he was going to start somewhere else. Somewhere he should have begun with.

Finding his centre, Sasuke shrugged off his memories of 'that night' and entered the district where most of the Uchiha used to live. They said it was still haunted by the restless ghosts of Itachi's family, and being the mindless sheep they were the people of Konoha refused to reinhabit it. Sasuke didn't care one way or another, but right now it made his job that much easier.

There, that was it. His home. Fugaku Uchiha's house was surprisingly small for a clan leader's, and certainly nothing compared to Hiashi Hyuga's mansion, but it was grand nevertheless. Gothic architecture unique to the street and a sprawling lawn marked it as the home of a powerful man. Though there was one more powerful still who once lived within its confines.

Sasuke froze in front of the door. Could he really do this? He'd sworn to never return until Itachi was slain and his clan avenged, but this was an emergency. Surely his family would understand…

He pushed the front door open. The hinges, iron rusted with years of disuse and merciless rain, gave way at the slightest touch, and the thick slab of wood fell back. The door landed with a flat bumping noise, scaring Sasuke. The young Uchiha leaped backwards, landing on the roof of the house across the street, and he forced himself to calm down.

_'It's okay, _that man_ isn't watching my every move. He had to leave the Leaf years ago, I'm safe now, he can't hurt me, there's nothing in there that can hurt me.'_ Sasuke wondered who he was trying to fool.

Inside, the dust lay thick on every surface, the wood rotting through and the furniture falling apart at the seams. Cobwebs dangled from the ceiling, coating Sasuke's cherished memories with dark recollections. Stubbornly refusing to admit defeat to his older brother, Sasuke soldiered on. He almost faltered at the stairs, but with effort he made himself climb the rickety structure. Each step creaked as he stepped on it, old wood protesting his presence and bending dangerously under his weight. Down the hallway, past his old bedroom, past his parent's room, all the way to the end of the hallway. There it was…

The door to Itachi's chamber was painted black by the man himself, setting it apart from the mahogany red of the other doors on the second floor. On the upper half, a beautifully detailed Uchiha fan had a jagged 'X' slashed through the wood with an ANBU katana. The lower half of the door had a contender for 'most ironic statement ever' scrawled on it with a pencil.

'Long live Konoha.'

It was faded and barely visible, but the mangekyo sharingan could pick out not only the words, but that they were written by a male, aged between thirteen and fifteen, impeccable handwriting but with a hint of urgency. Right handed, used his left hand, probably because of injury.

_'This is it,'_ Sasuke thought, staring at the door that represented his greatest fears and darkest ambitions. _'I have to open this door, there's no way around it. Time to see what these things I've got in my head are.'_

Another contender for 'most ironic statement ever'.

Sasuke opened the door quickly, his hand darting out, turning the knob and throwing it open. Then he fell back in fear, racing back to the far end of the hallway and preparing a barrage of flaming shuriken to skewer the beasts lurking inside. His heart was pounding with adrenaline, but nevertheless Sasuke entered, more alert and tense than he'd ever been before in his life.

Itachi's old room could be summed up in one word: spartan. There was a futon in the corner, a short dresser on the corner and his closet, with extra ninja uniforms hanging on hangars. There was nothing to suggest that it was once the dwelling of the most feared ninja in the Land of Fire.

_'Think, Sasuke, THINK! Where would it be?'_ He thought quickly, his eyes darting left and right lie searchlights. _'What's the fastest way to search a rogue shinobi's belongings?'_

With surprising strength, Sasuke ripped the door off of Itachi's closet, pulling out the two uniforms and formal suit and tearing through their pockets. A few coins, a spare kunai, but nothing incriminating. Throwing them in a pile in the middle of the room, Sasuke moved on to the futon. The little bed fell apart under his blade and spilled its stuffing on the floor, but it turned out to be nothing more than stiff fabric. His sharingan informed him that the futon was uncomfortable to sleep on.

The dresser was rifled through at superhuman speeds, drawers slamming in and out faster and faster as Sasuke grew more and more desperate. Not trapped, not locked, and no contents. Whatever had been in here, it had been taken with Itachi after the massacre. Disgusted, Sasuke picked the whole thing up and slammed it on the ground in the middle of the room as hard as he could. The dresser exploded in slivers of wood, sending up a cloud of dust.

He sank to his knees, on the verge of tears. His eyes were stinging, but Sasuke hardly noticed. What the hell was he supposed to do? A whirl of emotions flashed through him, but mostly it was confusion. What was happening? Why him? Why did Itachi do what he did? What were his real motives? Testing his capacity, as he said? Or to get these 'super' sharingan?

A single tear of blood dripped from Sasuke's eye and trailed down his face. It fell to the ground, in slow motion to his enhanced eyesight, and landed next to a sheet of paper.

Paper! Sasuke dove for it and snatched the glimmer of green paper from the ground. It must have been in a secret compartment in the dresser, probably a false bottom. There was a picture on the front of a sharingan with black lines covering the eye, one bloody tear dripping from the corner. The title proclaimed, in bold lettering, "SO, YOU ACCIDENTALLY KILLED YOUR BEST FRIEND? YOUR GUIDE TO THE MANGEKYO SHARINGAN!"

Under that was an untidy scrawl in black sharpie reading, "Property of: SHISUI UCHIHA— _Don't you dare touch this, Itachi!_"

_'Perfect!'_ Sasuke mentally crowed. So that's what his dojutsu was called: the mangekyo sharingan. Flipping the pamphlet open, he memorized the contents perfectly with his eyes and swore to review it later, when he wasn't standing in the bedroom of the man he'd sworn to kill.

He fled, dropping the brochure and flickering out of the Uchiha district as fast as humanly possible. Something there gave him the creeps, and it wasn't just the memories of his parents' deaths.

XXX

Itachi Uchiha watched his beloved younger brother leave the house and race down the road. It gave him a warm feeling to see his brother so improved from the rather ineffectual ninja he'd once been.

This new development was troubling, though. How had Sasuke discovered the way to unlock the next stage of the sharingan's mutation? It was probably an accident, but Itachi couldn't help but suspect that there was someone else's hand in it.

Did he know he would eventually go blind?

Itachi was faced with his own problems as well. His excuse for leaving Sasuke alive was his hope to one day entice him with the mangekyo sharingan's power, and then kill him and use his eyes to augment his own. Madara of all people could understand that sort of power play. But that was never his intent, and now Sasuke had put him in a tight spot. There was only so long he could pretend to not have noticed, and then the Akatsuki would begin to suspect.

Decisions, decisions…

He could feel the approaching chakra signatures of a squad of jonin, so Itachi resolved to confront his younger brother at a later date. He bowed his head, closed his eyes, and activated the teleportation technique just as Asuma Sarutobi got a good look at him.

To the Hokage's son, the man in the signature cloak of bloody rain appeared to dissolve into a murder of crows.

XXX

Usually, it was simple enough for Naruto to track Sakura down. Girls with pink hair really stood out in crowds, which the source of numerous comments from Tenten about how she gave kunoichi a bad name, and really, die that mass of cotton candy black or something, Sakura! But today, despite speaking to the older kunoichi, as well as Ino and Iruka, Naruto couldn't seem to find her after the disaster at the bridge. He figured that the Old Man might be able to point him in the right direction, but wasting the Hokage's time had gotten his ass kicked out of fourth story windows before. Safer to just wander around until he ran into her.

Then, he had a brainwave. Why not ask her parents? As far as he knew, Sakura still lived with them, and probably told them all about where she was going, and whether she had a nice day, and they restocked the refrigerator when the milk was empty...

Ahem.

Now, after giving Ino the third degree and a generous helping of Naruto-style harassment, he was happily skipping off to speak with Sakura's parents. They lived in a middle-class home in the civilian suburbs, though Ino said her father had once been a genin before a career-ending chunin exam. Something about fighting a ninjutsu user who used enough steam to flash-fry his left leg, and then went on to win the whole third round.

He knocked politely on the door and waited for some time before someone answered. She was a tall, haggard looking woman with close-cropped blonde hair and a tired frown set permanently on her face. On seeing Naruto, the frown deepened into a scowl, and she made to shut the door in his face. Naruto quickly stuck one foot into the doorjamb and waited while his teammate's mother tried fruitlessly to wait out her unwanted visitor. When that didn't work, she opened the door and stepped out, towering imperiously over the twelve-year-old boy.

"What?" Mebuki Haruno asked briefly, evidently hoping to be rid of him as soon as possible.

"Oh, uh, hi Sakura's Mom!" Naruto exclaimed. The Haruno matriarch developed a twitch over her left eye, but Naruto pretended not to notice. "I was wondering if you could tell me where Sakura is, 'cause I wanted to spar with her and work on a technique I was trying to–"

"She's not home," answered Mebuki flatly. "She'll show up for your little ninja powwow tomorrow."

_'Go away'_.

"Oh, I see," Naruto muttered dejectedly.

"Hey, honey!" came a masculine voice from the depths of Sakura's house. "Sakura wants to know where the extra towels are!"

Mrs. Haruno froze, her body unmoving but her mind racing. On the one hand, she could just get rid of the little demon and Sakura would never be the wiser, but his foot was still blocking the door. It would be easier, albeit more painful, to just let him in and try to ignore them, safety of her daughter be damned.

"They're in the linen closet!" she hollered back. Crouching to meet Naruto's eyes, Mebuki gave the jinchuriki a look that could give a lesser boy a heart attack. "Go in, talk to her, and get out of my house," she fairly snarled. Naruto nodded pleasantly and ducked neatly past the woman, blithely shrugging off her glare o' doom. Now he knew where Sakura got it, volatile little girl that she was. Inside, the house was just as completely unremarkable as it was outside, though a lot more spacious than anywhere Naruto had ever lived. A quick glance in the kitchen (they had an entire room, just for the kitchen!) confirmed that they did indeed restock the milk as soon as it ran out, as there was a full jug in the fridge and an empty one on the counter. Guiltily, Naruto shut the white metal door and turned around... and promptly smacked face-first into a giant of a man.

"WAAAAH!" he shrieked, jumping backwards and landing on the marble counter behind him. The man was massive, more than six feet tall and with a moustache to match. His hair was a dark pink explosion, dripping down his face and into his moustache, and his eyes were the same intense jade as Sakura's. He carried a sturdy wooden cane in his left hand, the handle engraved with a pouncing tiger.

"Hey there," he rumbled. "You must be Naruto Uzumaki. Sakura shouts about you sometimes."

His voice was deep and rough, but kind, like the Old Man's. Naruto took an instant liking to the ex-shinobi. "Nice to meet you, mister," he said emphatically, sliding off the counter and unobtrusively replacing the kunai he'd drawn in his weapon pouch.

Sakura's father laughed quietly. "You're my daughter's teammate; please, call me Kizashi," the man insisted. Naruto reddened and stammered an excuse about having to get going and have a nice day sir, so Kizashi politely stepped aside and let Naruto go upstairs. As the blond disappeared upstairs, he let out a soft chuckle.

XXX

When Sakura sensed Naruto approaching her house, whistling gaily and dancing in the streets, she knew she had to make up her mind quickly. Naruto's latest act of unbridled pervertedness deserved revenge on a grand scale, which meant either killing him as dead as Kakashi and the Hokage would allow (probably not all that much) or something subtle. Sakura decided on 'subtle', because it was that much more satisfying, and opted to quickly finish her ritual.

"... Jashin is all, death is the final embrace, in the next life know peace," she murmured, looking down at the innocent little critter lying on her floor. "Amen." With a quick slicing motion her tanto slit the squirrel's throat, and a small fountain of blood spilt out on to her floor. Nodding in satisfaction, Sakura stood up and cracked her knuckles. Time to get started.

She waited until her mother demanded that Naruto leave, then called down, "Daddy! Where are the extra towels?" Her father, she guessed correctly, had no idea in the slightest, and delivered the request to his wife. Sakura's smile stretched wide as she imagined the look on her mom's face and Naruto's confused, naïve expression. Mebuki tersely replied that they were in the linen closet, like she didn't know that already, and was forced to allow Naruto in.

She swept around the room, thankful for the diversion her father gave whilst she swept the squirrel corpse into her closet and waved her scythe over the remaining blood. The blessed metal absorbed the liquid, regenerating the scratches in its surface with cannibalized iron. She was just tossing the weapon on her bed and adopting a bored expression when Naruto kicked her door open and glomped onto her with a cheesy grin.

"Hey there, Sakura!" he shouted in her ear, and Sakura was suddenly struck with the familiar urge to kill something slowly. She pressed it down and returned Naruto's hug with bone-crushing force.

"Naruto! What'cha doin' here, huh?" she asked cheerfully, ignoring the ominous sound of cracking ribs.

"I.. wanted to... spar with you... maybe.. ramen... can't breathe..."

"Well, why didn'tcha say so?" Sakura went on, releasing the hug but slapping an arm around his shoulders and shaking vigorously. "Why don't we head on down to that shack you like eating at, and then we can beat the s*** out of each other?"

"Rea-?"

"LANGUAGE, YOUNG LADY!" shouted Mebuki. "JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE A KUNOICHI DOES _NOT_ MEAN YOUR MANNERS GO OUT THE WINDOW!"

"Sakura, Naruto, gentlemen do not swear," trailed up Kizashi's voice, with just a trace of mischief, "but those who do should join the Sir-Cuss! You get it? The circu– Ouch, darling!"

XXX

"Naruto, welcome back!" Teuchi cried, looking up from his book behind the register. "And who's your lovely young friend here?"

"Sakura, this is Teuchi. Teuchi, Sakura. Less talking more ramen!" Naruto pulled up a seat at the counter and sat down, gesturing at the one next to him for his _femme_ to have. Sakura took the chair graciously and surveyed Ichiraku Ramen with a critical eye. The whole place smelled of the vile, salty vomit that Naruto ate six times a day. It took every ounce of self control that she once possessed not to lose her nerve and slaughter everyone in the vicinity. Nevertheless, ignoring the pleas of her sensitive nose to leave and never return, Sakura smiled politely and ordered pork.

"I need to to teach me something," said Naruto seriously, as they waited for their orders.

"Mmm."

"You know my, ah, sand ability?"

Sakura gave him a flat look. "The one that tore me to shreds while you were staring at my ass?" she deadpanned.

Naruto winced. "It was an accident!"

"Yeah."

"Anyways," he coughed, "I need some techniques to control that stuff before I start killin' people who don't grow back!"

"I have no idea what you think I can do, but do go on," Sakura offered, amused.

"So, I was thinkin', maybe you could help my chakra control? I need more control before I can use bajillions of little bits of sand at once, so, uh..."

Sakura stared at him for a second. "You're asking _me_ for a favour? Why should I do _anything_ for you?"

Naruto couldn't think of an answer immediately, but when he did, he smiled brilliantly and put his chopsticks down. "Because, we're teammates," he told her gently, "and we have to watch each other's backs. I'd do the same for you, any day of the week."

"... Naruto, if I do this for you, you have to promise–"

"YES, YES, ANYTHING!" shouted Naruto, enthusiasm bleeding from his pores and making his hair stand on end. He looked like a puppy shagging a frisbee.

She knew this was a bad, bad idea, but she was powerless to stop herself from agreeing to teach Naruto how to do the tree walking exercise.

XXX

Kakashi decided to just stay in bed that day. It was too stressful to get out of bed and have to deal with the little brats again, so he was just going to lie there and hope Sarutobi didn't come smashing down the door.

"Dynamic Entry!"

***Smash!***

_'Oh God no, please, anyone but–"_

"My rival!" came a voice filled with exuberance. "I was informed by our youthful comrade Asuma and the even more youthful Kurenai that today—"

"Gaaaaaai..." Kakashi droned, propping himself up on his elbow. "Get out of house and let me sleep in."

"That is not very youthful of you, my eternal rival," Gai replied. "Come with me, that we might meet your genin team and see how they have progressed under your 'hip' tutelage!"

"No thanks. I don't want to die this morning. Akane gets laid in the next chapter, you see." He was sweating now, looking anywhere but at the green monstrosity that just put a hole in his wall.

"Ah! So they are filled with the fires of youth, are they? Surely three new ninja cannot be such a challenge for my rival?" Gai's genjutsu-enhanced smile never wavered, though his eyes wavered with confusion.

"You'd be sur–... hey, Gai, I need a favor."

"How may I be of assistance?"

"What are Kurenai and Asuma doing today?"

"When last I saw them, they had finished copulating! But recently, I suspect they are relaxing."

_'Too much information! This is good, though.' _Kakashi chuckled. "Go get them, and have them and their genin team meet at the second ANBU practice ground in an hour."

"I thought that was occupied?"

"Not anymore it isn't. You should come too, have Neji, Tenten and Lee join in the fun."

"As you say!" Gai cheered, sprinting off to Asuma's house so fast he left an afterimage. Perfect.

Kakashi smirked, satisfied, then flipped Icha Icha Paradise back open.

_'Daisuke pushed her back onto the bed, his lust evident in his words as he growled her name. Akane winked saucily, her eyes deep and shining wetly, and pulled his pants down around his ankles, then allowed him to strip her quickly before their passion–'_

"Heh."

XXX

The ANBU trained in artificially cultivated grasslands surrounded by woods and with a source of water for ninjutsu inside, like every other ninja in Konoha. However, there were significant differences. For one, they were much more durable than the average training ground. The village couldn't afford to replace so much terrain every time a large-scale earth or fire technique got out of control. For another, they had certain features designed to test tracking and teamwork during missions.

Mostly, they were designed with the intent to give one team a massive advantage over the other. A referee between matches could remotely configure traps for the defending or attacking team, and assaults on the lone structure had to be made uphill with no cover from incoming fire. In short, a ninja's nightmare. ANBU had to be ready for anything, so each location was equipped for maximum discomfort for one team and greatest sadistic enjoyment on the other. Kakashi, along with Agent Mouse, Agent Hawk and Agent Tiger had logged over a thousand hours on Ground Two, and now his little psycho's would know the joys of 'The Situation'.

There were twelve people there. First to arrive was Team Eight, with Hinata, Shino, Kiba and Kurenai. Then Team Ten, with Ino, Shikamaru, Choji and Asuma. Gai arrived with them, bringing his team. Lastly, almost half an hour late, was Team Seven. Kakashi made a point of arriving late, and there was a proud flush to his cheeks as he surveyed the livid genin.

"You're all late!" Kiba shouted, jumping out of a tree and pointing a finger accusingly at Team Seven. "Where do you get off telling us to be here, then standing us up?"

"Who cares?" Sasuke muttered. "We're here, let's get this over with."

"You must endeavour to be on time," replied Shino. "Why? Because your allies will rely on you to be there, and if you aren't they may start to distrust you."

"Kakashi suggested it," Naruto said proudly. "Well, not in words, but he keeps doing the same thing, and your jonin is supposed to be your role model, right?"

"Hardly," supplied Neji. "Your sensei teaches you what they see fit. Nevertheless, if Kakashi does not see fit to prioritize punctuality, who am I to question it?" Tenten nodded in agreement, but said nothing.

"Listen up!" Asume shouted, garnering the attention of everyone present except Sakura and Ino, who were engaged in a high-voltage staring contest.

"We're here to do a team training exercise that will test your combat abilities and improvisational skills." He lit up a cigarette and perched it between his lips. "There are four teams of three: Team Seven, Eight, Ten, and Gai has volunteered his genin to join us as well."

It didn't escape Naruto's notice that Team Gai looked half sullen and half bright green, but decided not to say anything.

"Now, the twelve of you will be split up into two groups. Group one will consist of Neji, Tenten, Lee, Hinata, Kiba, Shino, Choji, Shikamaru and Ino." Asume smiled wryly at their shocked expressions. "Team two will be Sakura, Naruto and Sasuke."

"What the–!" Kiba hollered indignantly. "What gives?"

"You assume that this is a fighting exercise," Asuma said easily. "It could just as easily be a test of tracking or infiltration."

"But it's not," Neji cut in. "It's leadership."

"Correct!" Gai shouted, awkwardly embracing the Hyuga. Tenten stifled a snicker at her teammate's horrified expression, and Sakura joined in with full-blown guffaws when his younger clone jumped in on the other side, shouting about 'youthful perception'.

"See that tower?" Asuma pointed at the stone structure on the hill. "You have to prevent all of the members of Team Seven from reaching the third floor of that structure. How you do this isn't important, and you have several advantages. Firstly, this training ground is rigged with almost two thousand explosive tags, which can be detonated from the tower. As well, you will elect a leader, who you will have to obey absolutely."

"This seems rather unfair to them," mused Choji. "Kiba kinda had a point."

"It gets better," Kurenai said with a grin. "Your leader not only has complete control over your team, but they can also command myself, Asuma, Kakashi and Gai. Essentially, that's eight genin and four jonin against _them_."

"Don't make me do too much," Kakashi muttered. "Life is too sweet to waste toadying to genin."

"Awesome!" grunted Sakura, cracking her knuckles and reaching into her voluminous robes for her tanto. Ino blinked, shaking her head and wondering what had just happened.

"There are some restrictions," Asuma said, rounding on Kakashi's team. "I've been told to tell you that, to even the playing field, you may not use quote, 'that sand technique, that black fire, and that genjutsu'. As well, Sakura, you are specifically forbidden from killing anyone. Even if they call you pinkie."

The pink haired girl pouted, sheathing the tanto with a muted click. At least she still had her scythe, and Jashin took tributes of fear as well as blood.

Three different clones of Kurenai appeared, much more detailed and realistic than the average doppelganger, and each walked off in a different direction. "I'll show you to where you'll start," each of them said. Team Seven disappeared, much to the relief of Kakashi.

"To the tower, where we will pick a most youthful leader and allow them to lead us to glorious victory!" Lee ran off.

XXX

"Who's the leader then?" Tenten asked.

"W-why not N-Neji?" Hinata said softly. "H-He's v-very experienced."

"He cannot," Shino said. "Why, you ask? Because he is the best fighter present, save our sensei. To use him otherwise would unnecessarily cripple our fighting force."

"Why not you?" Ino proposed. "You're very smart, if a little quiet."

"I-ah... N-no! No! I... can't..." the Hyuga heir muttered.

Nobody said anything for a few seconds. Then, as one, eleven heads turned towards Shikamaru.

"This is far too troublesome," the boy ground out. "Too much effort to do it... too much effort to say no... yes. Very well, I have a plan in mind."

"Do tell," Kiba said conversationally.

"Ideally, I would split up our resources as efficiently as possible, but I know next to nothing about our opponents." He looked expectantly at the jonin, but Asuma shook his head.

"In that case," Shikamaru went on, "I will keep Ino and Hatake here as our last line of defense. Hinata, your byakugan can see everywhere in the training ground, correct?" The pale-eyed girl nodded in affirmative. "You will relay information to me."

"I brought earpieces," Tenten supplied, holding out a plastic bag with the equipment inside. "Already calibrated and good to go."

Shikamaru distributed the radio devices and did a quick mic check, then spoke up. "Excellent. Then, we will operate in groups of three. Might, you take Lee and Kiba to fight Sakura. Yuhi, you will go with Tenten and Choji to fight Sasuke. Sarutobi, you have Neji and Shino on Naruto. Hinata will give you the directions. Clear out!"

XXX

Sasuke waited with Kurenai's watchful clone, no doubt observed by four all-seeing eyes to make sure he wasn't cheating. Not like he had anything to worry about, his graduating class was full of chumps. On the other hand, he thought that about Sakura, but now she had all the vulnerability of the earth itself. You could hit her... like that would do any good. Naruto too, so maybe there was worry to be had.

Some time later, the illusionary woman told him that the test was starting and vanished. Sasuke took a moment to get his bearings before leaving. Kurenai had directed him around a river to a knoll overlooking the whole setup. He had to give ANBU credit, he couldn't see the exploding tags buried in the ground. The tower was just a kilometer or so away, just visible from the hilltop, so off he went.

He was about halfway there when Choji Akimichi's inflated fist collided meatily with his face. He flew backwards, skimming the ground and carving a trench two feet deep with his body. When he stopped, he didn't bother to get back up.

"Are you okay?" Choji shouted, genuine concern lighting up his eyes. He'd never used his clan's techniques on another genin before, and it was kind of scary to see Sasuke just lying there in the dirt.

A massive violet arm, skeletal and radiating chakra, reached up from Sasuke's prone form and slammed into his chest. Before he knew what had happened, Choji had been smashed into the ground at frightening speeds. He passed out on impact, probably with a concussion. Immediately afterwards, a tan blur jumped out and grasped the larger boy by the scruff of the neck, disappearing behind the cover of a small copse.

Tenten was doing a better job of dealing with the panic than Kurenai was. The girl was already coming up with a strategy to best this gigantic foe, but Kurenai was horrified by the sheer _nonchalance_ with which Sasuke had dealt with Choji. He hadn't even stood up before swatting him away with something she was dead certain wasn't a genjutsu.

"Report," came Shikamaru's tinny voice in her ear. She used a quick genjutsu to shield her reply from Sasuke, if he was listening.

"Choji is unconscious," the jonin hissed into her microphone. "Sasuke is armed with some kind of offensive taijutsu device, a bit like a Suna puppet. Hinata, keep an eye on us."

"I, uh, oooh, okay... Shikamaru, blow it!" Hinata shrieked. Far away, an explosion went off with bone-shattering force. Shikamaru belatedly muted her feed.

Tenten chucked a few shuriken at Sasuke from her cover, but the purple chakra shield deflected them all effortlessly. She watched, calculating weapon vectors and kinetic forces as Sasuke rose from the ground. The violet energy assembled itself in the recognizable shape of a human skeleton, towering over her with divine authority. Sasuke's gaze was focused a few feet to the left of her.

"Tenten," her earpiece buzzed. "Retreat. Yuhi will delay Sasuke for as long as possible. Hinata will direct you to Sarutobi to help with the fight against Naruto. Neji will supply you with information."

"Copy that," she replied dejectedly, replacing her sealing scrolls and nodded at Kurenai before taking off.

The red-eyed woman regarded Sasuke warily, the boy looking around for other threats. Delving into her own mind, she weaved one of her most powerful illusions around Sasuke, simultaneously pitting him against four phantom jonin and depleting him of the logic that would otherwise tell him it was a genjutsu. That was her talent, and not even the sharingan could defeat her.

Five hundred meters away, Hinata saw her sensei glow with pride, and she smiled.

XXX

Sakura moved through the forested area with what could only be called a flounce, her demeanour completely uncaring even as Kiba and Akamaru advanced menacingly. With a snarl, Akamaru bounced forward and latched his jaws over her thigh. Blood spurted from the wound in red ropes, and the femur cracked slightly. To Kiba and Lee's eternal confusion, she whipped out a metal disc and held it to her forehead.

"Jashin, grant me thy mercy for failing to deliver unto you this infidel's immortal soul," she chanted. "I shall redeem myself. Amen."

Sakura jabbed the immobile wolfhound in the neck, and Akamaru crumbled. She gently pried his jaws off her leg and carelessly tossed the body away. An indignant Kiba screamed something at her, and met a similar end at the end of her fist.

"Come out, come out, you sneaky ninja bastards!" she called, her eyes roaming the forest. "I don't have all day to just stand here!"

"Allow me to introduce myself," came a voice from behind her. Sakura spun around slowly to face none other than–

"I am the Blue Beast of Konoha, Rock Lee!" shouted Rock Lee.

"As much as I hate to be the voice of reason, your outfit is blue," said the slightly confused Jashinist. "Shouldn't you be the Green Beast?"

"I wanted to," Lee admitted sheepishly, "but that is my sensei's name. Perhaps some day I will change the colour of my uniform."

"Stylish," Sakura noted, before slamming a kick into the strange ninja's thigh. She hadn't expected him to retaliate, but Lee was fast enough to catch it on his forearm and strike for her shoulder. Ineffective, but apparently she needed to up her game.

"You're pretty good," said Sakura, rubbing her smarting shoulder. "I need to try harder against you." With that, she upped her speed a few notches and punched Lee in the stomach. Lee retaliated with the most halfassed attack she'd ever been subjected to. The speed was blinding, but it barely even stung. She slapped him across the face and moved back a bit.

"That was f***ing pathetic," she snarled. "You hit like a– is this because I'm a girl?"

"It isn't proper for a man to hit a woman!" Lee proclaimed. Fortunately, the red handprint on his cheek had been put there months before by Tenten, so he didn't feel as much pain as he had the first time. Gai called this 'desensitization', and it was the basis of his training regime.

Her eyes darkening in rage, Sakura abandoned all pretence of planning and charged forward with the speed of a diving falcon. Lee yelped and jumped, her momentum carrying her under him as he precisely drove her face into the ground.

She got up slowly, savouring the feeling of being outsmarted. Brushing the mud out of her no-longer-white robes, Sakura spat out a mouthful of clay. "Clever," she admitted.

"When you wear a forehead protector, you are no longer a woman, but a kunoichi," said Lee. "You have an advantage over me, so I must create my own advantages over you."

From a short distance away, Gai watched his student banter with the pinkette. It was obvious that she was just toying with him, because every time Lee made to advance an attack, she simply ducked out of the way while commenting on ways to improve his technique. Shikamaru was talking to the other groups, so evidently they were on their own.

"Lee," Gai said into his earpiece. "Use the first chakra gate!" It was a dangerous gambit, but one that the experienced ninja was confident in.

Lee's posture radiated confusion, but he nevertheless baited Sakura into overextending. With a small spark of chakra to a well-memorized point in his own brain, Lee's strength multiplied by five... just in time for his fist to crash through her spine entirely. The green-suited lad's face fell, almost comically, but then lit in horror as the girl who really should have been paralyzed from the waist down grabbed his arm and shoved him back.

"Holy s**t!" she screamed, furious. "I can't kill you, but you turn around and do _this_?" Slowly, her vertebrae were pushing themselves back into alignment, nerve tissue and skin regrowing over the wound. With a sickening jolt Sakura forced herself to stand upright, and in her hands she held a weapon that would do Tenten proud. Gai was already in motion when she swung the scythe, catching the blade with his bare hands and throwing her away.

Sakura righted herself midair, throwing the scythe to the ground and hurling herself back with the metal cord as Gai jumped to shield Lee with himself. When they collided, Sakura's scythe flashed forward with speed that almost matched his own, and Gai drew two kunai to deflected the reaving blade. He suspected it was the width of her swings that slowed her down, which was fortunate for him. Lee jumped around behind her and used the last dregs of his energy to attack. Sakura dodged with unnatural grace and sliced his shirt open neatly. Blood oozed sluggishly from the cut.

"Meh," she pronounced. "I was expecting better."

Gai managed to get behind her guard while she was distracted and literally tore her right arm off. The scythe toppled to the ground, Sakura growling as she was both disarmed and disarmed. She feinted right and attacked low with her tanto, the scythe dragging behind her by the cable, but Gai poured on the speed and tore her other arm off.

As he scooped up the barely conscious Lee, he lamented that his rival's setup had gone so awry. Lee was down, Shikamaru was shouting at Tenten to hurry up, Hinata was directing Kurenai's genjutsu, and Sakura had taken out two genin without even trying. Whatever Kakashi was teaching his students, it was effective.

Rock Lee screamed. While she was down, Sakura managed to lick some of his blood off her scythe by wriggling over to it, and was now lying like a worm in the centre of a circle of blood. Arcane symbols writhed down her robes and across her face, and she was merrily slamming her forehead into the ground over and over again.

Lee screamed again, a small droplet of blood appearing in the middle of his eyebrows, and Gai instantly came to a number of conclusions. One, Sakura could inflict her own injuries on other people. Two, she could function even without the aid of her arms, something he no longer felt even the slightest shred of guilt over anymore. Three, in about five seconds Lee would be facing permanent brain damage.

He could be forgiven for overreacting just a bit when he almost tore her head off her shoulders. At the last second, he realized that it would be counterproductive, as there was every chance she wouldn't care and would probably pass the decapitation on to his student. As he deliberated, holding the armless cultist by the neck, she smiled gruesomely and wrapped both legs around his waist. The cable snapped taut, the scythe connected to her hip holding steady enough for her to rock backwards and hurl Gai away with ease.

Her torso made an excellent corkboard for a brace of kunai, but Gai realized at the peak of his flight that she'd aimed him for the fallen Kiba, and hitting him would probably be fatal. So he spun away, and landed on his head, and after that there was nothing.

* * *

**This chapter is a bit longer, so I cut it in half. I was torn between making the training situation a faceroll for Team Seven and making it more realistic, and I decided on realistic. It would be much less interesting otherwise. About the fight with Lee, I figured that at this point his weights had already been taken off in preparation for his fight with Sakura. **

**I'd like to apologize for making everything about Sakura so gory, but at this point she's like a more vicious version of Hidan. I can't make full use of her voodoo doll jutsu otherwise. Nobody is going to die, I promise.**

**About her parents, I used the canon versions of them. Yes, Mebuki and Kizashi are canon, and yes, Kizashi really makes bad puns. I'm told they make more sense in Japanese.**

**Also, yes, everything is Chekhov's Gun.**

**Many thanks to my reviewers!**

_Up Next:_

_The fight is concluded, and the results are earth-shattering! And Sasuke makes a friend?_


	4. Can't We All Just Get Along?

**Aggressive Action**

_Can't We All Just Get Along?_

* * *

Not quite two steps into his journey, Naruto was set upon by kikaichu bugs. The Aburame's parasitic servants swarmed around him in a loose cloud, hundreds of insects preparing to dive-bomb him and suck out his chakra. Not knowing about their connection with Shino, Naruto simply assumed that they were part of the test. As they circled him, eyeing the jinchuriki malevolently, one of them darted out to land on his body. A small wave of sand rippled across Naruto's skin in retaliation, crushing the insect to a mushy pulp.

What really caught Naruto's attention was the fact that the sand which touched the insect went inert, his rage-chakra no longer able to hold it up. The hurricane of kikachu buzzed angrily, and a few hundred thousand coalesced into the form of Shino Aburame, who was uncharacteristically angry.

"I will destroy you," the bug user hissed, arranging his symbiotic weapons into an organized array. A few hand gestures later and a group of the insects the size of a fist detached from the rest and dived at Naruto. As he'd expected, the sand rose up to engulf them in a ball, but as it did so a second group of insects arose to fly around the sand. Shino's ploy hid the action for a few seconds, but as the bugs retreated Naruto was dismayed to find that they were all still alive. The sand fell to the ground, useless.

"As I suspected," Shino said conversationally. "Your ninjutsu is weak against my own. This is because my kikaichu can absorb the chakra from your sand, and without that you are disarmed. Surrender, because you cannot win." His dark sunglasses glinted maliciously in the light.

The red chakra from Naruto's seal reached out cautiously, recapturing the sand in a dark cocoon and lifting it back into the air. An alien feeling emanated from the seal, one that Naruto didn't recognize as his own. Whatever had given him the sand, it was nervous. Feeling exceptionally silly, Naruto looked down at his own stomach. "Listen up," he snapped, "this is nothing. What do you want me to do, lie down and give up?" Immediately, he felt the being inside the seal calm, the chakra filled with renewed power and confidence.

"Are you well?" asked a puzzled Shino. "We can end the test and have a medic look at you, if that is what you need."

Naruto smiled. "Nope!" he replied, and charged. The insects formed a physical barrier to his progress, but Naruto's sand formed long fingers that reached ahead and shoved the insects aside. It cost chakra, and even as the insects grew stronger Naruto could feel his passenger lose power. It wasn't enough, however, because whatever was powering the sand had more chakra than the average jonin. There were only a few meters separating the two genin.

Kunai in hand, Naruto slashed down at Shino. The taller boy spun out of the way and backhanded Naruto in the gut. He doubled over, wheezing, but the sand blocked the following two strikes to the face and side. Shino frowned behind his collar. Naruto's sand evidently operated as a shield without needing a directing will. A nearby tendril snaked out and tried to encircle Shino's ankle, but one of his insects sapped it of chakra before the noose could tighten.

Still sputtering, Naruto internally cursed that the sand hadn't blocked Shino's first attack. Unbidden, a vision of a red-haired woman sticking her tongue out insolently came to mind. He growled, straightening and facing his lone adversary.

_'All right, that's enough. I don't know who you are or why you're inside me, but you're on my side, right?'_ The being was listening, like a god listens to the prayer of a devout. _'Umm, there has to be something I can do for you if you'll help me! What do you want? Blood sacrifice, my soul, anything?'_

A picture formed in his head. At first, Naruto didn't know that it was the price for aid, because it was something he thought about all the time. When it persisted, he almost burst into laughter.

_'Ramen? Ha! I can do that!'_ Naruto crowed in his mind. _'Shake on it?'_

Bizarre as it was, a slender, feminine hand made of sand burst from his abdomen.

XXX

Neji arrived just in time to see Shino bite the dust. A sweat-soaked Naruto had lanced him through the gut with a hand gesture, sending a few grains of sand all the way through Shino's belly. A splatter of blood landed behind him, and with an agonized cry the Aburame hit the floor.

"That was a bit harsh," Naruto told... nobody, as far as he could see, and that was pretty far. The orange-clad ninja casually stepped over Shino's body and walked on.

"Stop," Neji ordered. Naruto looked up at him, and his face broke into a wide grin. "Hey!" he exclaimed, "round two! Maybe this'll be a challenge after all!"

Neji really would have liked to say that Naruto was destined to fail, but he knew next to nothing about the guy other than that his teammates were apparently doing rather well against their own adversaries. Hinata broke into the communication, directing Lee and Gai to Sakura, who had apparently taken out the much faster Kiba without even trying.

"Perhaps you are a worthy foe," the Hyuga mused, "but I am rather confident in my own ability. It seems fate will decide the winner in this contest."

"Bring it," the jinchuriki growled. His sand jumped up behind him, roaring forward to engulf Neji with sand.

Despite his fanatical training regimen, Neji hadn't yet been able to use the Main House chakra expulsion techniques without using nearly all of his chakra in the process. A full kaiten was next to useless, as it would leave him too drained to stand. The next best thing was a partial shield, and that he could do. Drawing on his reserves of chakra, a blue field surrounded Neji's hands, and the disruptive technique easily repelled Naruto's sand.

Naruto drew forward and thrust with one hand, a pillar of sand driving at Neji, who dodged and moved around the sand until they were face to face. A few strikes revealed that the sand could block faster than Naruto could, but that his Gentle Fist was enough to dismantle the defence. He only got in two featherlight taps past the sand, but it was enough.

"Cool," said Naruto, "but why not use a kunai? I barely felt those punches." Then his arms fell to his sides, the tenketsu blocked. No chakra flowed in, none out, and scratching his nose would now be at least three times as hard.

"This is the Hyuga's kata: the Gentle Fist," Neji gloated. "With it, I have disabled your arms for a number of hours by injecting chakra into your body, jamming your chakra network open and disrupting your fine motor control."

"Again, wouldn't it be more effective if you used a knife?" Naruto asked.

"Had I targeted your heart, you would not be asking that," Neji replied. He really didn't expect Naruto to give up, but there was no way he could seal all of his chakra without killing him. Hopefully the arms would at least slow him down.

Thirty seconds later, Neji went down, the sand having picked up a comically large branch and smashed him viciously over the head with it. He raised his arms to block it, but the force behind the blow was hard enough to plow through his right ulna, shattering it. Neji only had time to reinforce his skull with an aura of chakra before he became acquainted once again with the ground.

Naruto sighed, looking down at his arms and wondering if Neji's cousin, What's-Her-Face Hyuga could fix whatever he'd done to him. The shy girl didn't seem forthcoming, so instead he soldiered on without aid of arms. A cursory look at Shino showed that the large boy was breathing rhythmically, down but not out. A few kikaichu were crawling desperately across his face, their antennae rubbing over his nose and mouth.

_'Creepy,'_ thought Naruto. _'At least they're not in his mouth.'_

Neji was in a bit worse condition. Maybe hitting him with a makeshift club had been a bit over the top, but the look on the serious guy's face was totally worth it. The being in control of his sand seemed to think so as well, as gay laughter was echoing through his subconscious. Nevertheless, Naruto crouched down by his side to check if he was still alive. Without arms he couldn't check his pulse or feel for his breath, so instead he stared at Neji's chest until he could pick out the faint rise and fall.

"You killed him?" asked an astonished, fearful voice. Naruto looked up sharply at the speaker, who he recognized as the Chinese kunoichi from before.

"I think he's still breathing," Naruto muttered, just before the sand was forced to intercept a thin metal spear aimed for his shoulder. The kunoichi growled, despite the obvious fear shining through her eyes, and threw an exploding tag into his face. The sand wrapped itself tightly around the device, but the smoke did it's job in blinding him. Naruto stumbled back, stumbling and shaking his torso ineffectively to ward off incoming attacks.

Instead, the girl waited a few meters away for him to get his bearings. Naruto paused, watching her watch him. She wasn't scared anymore, he noticed. Now, her face looked confident and assured, and a small smile played at her lips.

"What?" he asked, confused.

Her eyes flickered, almost on purpose, and with agonizing slowness Naruto spun around, ordering the sand to protect him from ninjutsu or weapons on the ground. Whatever trap she'd set up while he couldn't see, the sand could protect him. Why was he turning his back to her? The voice was screaming at him to get on guard, back up towards the girl, but he ignored it.

A tall, muscular man with a serious expression and a hidden chakra signature opened his left hand and chopped him hard across the neck. The jugular vein squeezed close, and Naruto was out like a light.

XXX

Asuma Sarutobi slung Naruto over his shoulder and stood up, the limp boy swinging back and forth. Tenten nodded in satisfaction after checking that her teammate was still breathing, happy that her friend hadn't died in a training exercise.

"Tenten, sensei, return to base," Shikamaru instructed over the radio.

"Give us a minute to bind Naruto," Asuma replied.

"No, bring him too," the genius ordered. "We have a new plan."

"This ought to be good," said Tenten. "I'll stabilize Shino and Neji. Asuma has Naruto."

Hinata's voice broke in. "Kurenai is losing control over Sasuke, and Sakura has taken out all three of her pursuers."

"Even Might?" gasped Shikamaru. "Tenten, do _not_ engage Sakura. Sensei, hurry back with Naruto!"

XXX

With a final, sharp crack of chakra, Sasuke broke the most powerful illusion that had ever been used on him. It took over quite a while before he realized that it was even a genjutsu to begin with, but even though he knew that Kakashi wasn't really there, his Chidori still hurt like a bitch. Furthermore, his sharingan wasn't helping, either to cancel the genjutsu or copy the fearsome array of techniques the jonin were throwing at him.

When the genjutsu shattered, he was annoyed to find that Kurenai had taken her leave, and he was now alone in the area. The tower was easy enough to find, but just in case Sasuke made the handseal and said "Kai!" to check. Seeing as it wasn't another genjutsu, he got up and walked away. When it came to his attention that his arm was fractured from having landed on it, Sasuke deliberated before deciding that winning with a debilitating injury would be that much sweeter.

Thus, cradling his arm to his chest, Sasuke set off again. This time, something far more welcoming interrupted him.

"_Heeeey,_ _Sasuke!_"called Sakura. She was holding the unconscious body of Rock Lee to her chest with one arm, her bloody scythe strapped to her back, and her robes mostly blood-free, except for a stain under her collar. Also, one arm was missing. Sasuke decided that it was probably still regenerating, but felt a little cheated that his injury had been shown up.

"Sakura," he replied politely. The strange boy on her chest didn't appear to be breathing, but Sasuke had faith that she wouldn't kill people when more powerful people had threatened to figure out a way to kill her. Hmm... it sounded more impressive when it was a jonin saying it.

"Who is that?" he finally said, gesturing at Lee.

"Well, he calls himself the Blue Beast of Konoha," Sakura mused, "but obviously he isn't blue. He's blue like Naruto is f***ing pink. Therefore, I will rechristen him the Cerulean Beast of Konoha!"

Sasuke blinked. "Why?"

"Well, that way he can still be 'blue', but if anyone asks they'll interpret it as green! It's f***ing genius!" The psychopathic girl beamed.

The old Sakura was a bit less enthusiastic about sharing her bright ideas, but this certainly had her fingerprints on it. Her inane, completely uninteresting fingerprints. It seemed there was still only one way to get rid of a fangirl.

"Shut the f*** up."

"_Make me!_"

"Go f*** yourself."

"CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!"

Sasuke shut his eyes, opened them again, and used Amaterasu to cauterize Sakura's shoulder stump. Lee writhed in his sleep, trying to get away from the unholy heat, but Sakura just smiled at him angelically. "If you're into that," she whispered, "that's swell... I love pain!"

"Does your depravity know no end?" Sasuke asked rhetorically, satisfied that she wouldn't be regrowing the arm for the foreseeable future.

"Depends," Sakura replied. "I just turned a snappy nickname into a laughable tongue twister, and before that I tried to kill a genin by throwing a jonin at him, and before _that_ I won a fight by smashing my face into the ground. Speaking of which, I might have missed a kunai. Mind taking this out for me?" She turned slightly, thrusting her posterior out to show the metal knife stuck into her lower back. "I can't reach my a** right now."

Sasuke desperately wanted to refuse, but it occurred to him that leaving an ally with a weapon in their butt would be rather counterproductive. Thus, while tugging on the kunai, he tried to ignore the sickly pops of her flesh relinquishing the blade and the way she was moaning his name seductively.

"Hurry up," the Uchiha grunted, tossing Gai's kunai on the ground and moving on.

Sakura put Lee down to pick the 'souvenir' up, and only then did Hinata give the order to blow the ground up in her face.

XXX

The small bluff beneath the tower was shrouded in shadow. Shikamaru lay back on a lawn chair just in front of the door, his eyes closed and body relaxed. Next to him, Hinata relayed that Sakura was only mildly annoyed that her new kunai was scorched black by the exploding tag, and Ino was fretting that her hair was too casual for a fight. Tenten irately ripped a senbon out of her hands, saying that they weren't f***ing bobby pins, damnit!

Kakashi was hiding in the tower. Icha Icha Paradise was open in front of his face, but his eyes weren't reading the words they were seeing.

"They're here," announced Hinata. Immediately, Kurenai grabbed Ino and Tenten by their collars and dragged them back to the wall of the tower, creating a genjutsu to hide the three of them. Shikamaru nodded to no one in particular.

Sasuke opened the final fight with Amaterasu, drawing a ring of black flame around himself and the tower. Sakura dumped Lee off outside the fire, then stepped quickly through the last gap in the wall before Sasuke closed it.

"Congratulations," Shikamaru yawned, not deigning to look at them. "I always knew you two were prodigies."

"Where are Tenten and Kurenai?" asked Sasuke.

"It would be far too troublesome to fight you myself," Shikamaru went on, "so I won't."

"Bring on Kakashi then, or f***ing Asuma or whoever."

"Sure thing," offered the Hokage's son, approaching the two from behind. "I think–"

Sasuke formed six handseals without turning around, and a wind bullet blasted Asuma off his feet. As he struggled to get up, Asuma readied a cloud of ash to blanket the field, but a strike from the butt end of the scythe put an end to that.

A mop of silver hair poked out over the top or the tower. Kakashi's sharingan picked out the softest part of the ground below, and promptly threw Naruto's body at it. The sand cushioned his fall, reacting the the most perilous circumstances even without consciousness, but Asuma was less lucky.

Ino winced at the crunch, but she had the sense to remember her job. The Yamanaka readied her signature technique, aimed the modified bird seal at Naruto's unmoving form, and fired. There was a moment of incredible dizziness, like the world had been turned upside-down and squeezed until the colours ran like wet paint, and her body dropped like a sack of flour. Tenten shot out an arm and caught Ino by the arm, her eyes on the action.

Naruto shuddered and stood up, the infusion of chakra jolting his system back to life. Sakura watched him suspiciously, moving back to a safe distance before daring to send a questioning glance at Shikamaru.

"Hurry up, Ino," the bored Nara drawled. 'Naruto' shot the boy a dirty look, then looked down at 'his' hands.

"How do I use this stuff, exactly?" 'he' asked.

"I think it reacts to your environment," Shikamaru replied. "Just get them to attack you."

Ino dragged her new body over to the entrance of the tower, ignoring Sasuke and Sakura's amused expressions. The worst that could happen was they beat their stupid teammate up, so it was okay to be a little reckless.

"Bring it!" she growled. The remaining members of Team Seven burst into laughter, doubled over and wheezing. Everyone was mutually confused, until the sand moulded itself into a sphere around her, trapping her inside. In the back of his mind, Naruto giggled at the sand's response, and Kushina laughed maniacally.

"Wha-? What is this?" Ino groused, only for Sakura to simply roll the ball out of the doorway.

Kurenai's earpiece buzzed. "If any of you think you can stop them at this point, feel free to spend six weeks in the hospital. Shikamaru out."

Hinata waited until they were directly before her, standing her ground with determination scrawled over her face... and promptly and politely opened the door for them. Sasuke nodded at her as he passed, and Sakura stuck out her tongue.

"Don't mind me," Kakashi squeaked, shuffling further back into a corner.

"Go up," Sasuke told Sakura, surveying the ground floor. She raised an eyebrow, but nevertheless ambled over to the stairs and started the climb for victory. When she was gone, Sasuke quickly searched the room in greater detail until he found it: the control panel for the exploding tags.

Above it was a map, with charcoal markings encircling the places where unconscious ninja were lying in the woods. Sasuke located all of the switches for these parts, as well as the ones for the self-destruct under the tower. These he ripped out. Then, he flipped the rest with one grand sweep, and pretended to listen to the glorious sound of nineteen hundred explosives sizzling devilishly.

* * *

There was a very big boom.

* * *

Gai was shocked out of his slumber by a sound like cannon fire. He jumped straight to his feet, happy demeanour gone, and surveyed the place. The trees limited sight to a few meters, but at least Kiba was alive. Akamaru was jumping around frantically, and Kiba was trying to calm the dog down. Lee was nowhere to be seen. Immediately jumping to a worst-case scenario, Gai forced himself to assume that the she-demon Sakura had already killed him and was filleting the meat from his bones. Trying to ignore the way his heart was pounding, he went past the frantic Inuzuka and wandered out of the clearing. Everywhere, as far as the eye could see, was destroyed. The copse where Sakura had left him and his team was a green island in a sea of brown, rocky destruction. Black scorch marks dotted the earth, and jagged spikes of bedrock stood up from the ground. A little ways away, a metal pillar stood out of the ground, a support unearthed by some cataclysm. An apocalypse.

Gai swallowed, steadying his nerves. The chunin handbook had a chapter on what to do if the village was in mortal peril. He'd loved that book, read it verbatim to Kurenai and Asuma and his Youthful Rival, and now he would never impart its lessons to his protégé...

Might Gai sobbed, just once, mourning the death of everyone he knew and loved, and then switched back to stern, unyielding jonin of the Leaf. He'd survived the Third Shinobi World War, he'd survived the brutal lessons of Kondo Yuhi, and he'd survived Hizashi Hyuga's collection of classical records (in the name of Youth!), he could damn well face up to the truth. The truth that three genin had somehow called down armageddon on Konoha, and maybe even the Elemental Nations. He spared a moment to admire the inferno of their youth. Hellfire, that is. Brimstone and foul sulphur riding on currents of air, as a demonic Naruto Uzumaki stood over a dead Tenten, a massive claw reminiscent of the kyuubi's planted in her back, and Sasuke duelling with a losing Neji, and Sakura-f***ing-Haruno whispering poison in Lee's ear as the boy was crucified on a training post...

He snapped himself out of his imaginings. There was no good done in mourning, he'd learned that long ago. Now there was only action. Gai returned to Kiba, who was lying flat on his back in the clearing, staring at the sky. Akamaru lay on his chest, panting heavily and whining on occasion. He surveyed them, boy and dog, for about a minute. Nobody knows what through his head in that minute, and nobody will ever know.

Gai sat down next to Kiba's head and looked the feral ninja in the eye.

"Do you want me to teach you?" he asked.

XXX

Shino felt fortunate that he was blind, because if he had sight to see the explosion that rocked the world he would have gone blind. When the ringing in his ears subsided and he could stand without his stomach lurching unpleasantly, his kikaichu located the tower, which remained conspicuously standing, and went that way. His longcoat left a torrent of leftover sand in his wake.

Meanwhile, Choji slept the sleep of the innocent. Not even a 4-gigajoule explosion could wake him up when he was tired.

XXX

"So, who wants to go for ramen?" Naruto proposed in a whisper. The three of them were hiding in a dumpster behind Yakiniku Q, waiting for the ANBU patrols sweeping Konoha to give up looking for them. It was tight, smell, and Sasuke could swear that Sakura's face was buried in his chest on purpose.

"Imbecile," Sasuke ground out. "Ichiraku is the first place they looked for us!"

"Oh, but the ANBU will never find us," Naruto promised, wiggling his left leg to get some room for it. It brushed against Sakura's stump, which still hadn't healed, and she cursed quietly.

"Hn."

"Sure! I've been pulling pranks around this village for seven years and ANBU had _never_ caught me!"

"Yeah, let's go for ramen," Sakura added. They both stopped, and would have stared at her if there wasn't trash blocking their vision.

"What? It tastes like s***, but I'm hungry enough to eat anything right around now," she justified to Sasuke's ribcage.

"I'll overlook that part about ramen if you _go on a date with me!_" Naruto squealed.

"You just kicked my ear," Sasuke informed him.

Naruto, then Sakura and Sasuke extricated themselves from the tangled embrace of filth before following Naruto to the end of the alley. The master prankster looked around, his senses straining to find someone with Asuma-level stealth creeping up on them. With nobody in the vicinity, he allowed himself a small chuckle.

"Watch carefully," he said, forming the dog, boar and ram seals, then adding an extra ram when his chakra was flowing nicely. Sasuke recorded the technique, and chuckled when Naruto transformed into a naked woman disguised by a few well-placed smoke clouds.

"Daaaaamn!" Sakura whistled appreciatively. "Nice curves, blondie. Make the tits bigger next time, change the clouds to a bathing suit and you're golden."

"Not the point I was trying to make," Naruto muttered, snapping his/her fingers to banish the transformation. "If you use an extra ram seal at the end, your polymorph is focused a bit more. It's virtually impossible to see through.

"And naturally you used this ground-breaking new ninjutsu to turn into a nude girl," said Sasuke. "Why does that surprise me?"

"But I don't _have_ to be," Naruto emphasized. With another expenditure of chakra, Naruto became taller, with bronzed skin and a tattoo of a shuriken crossed by a stylized leaf on his bare shoulder. His pants remained the same, but his shirt was now only a few scraps of clothing held together by stitches.

"Ta-da!"

XXX

Ichiraku Ramen now had three brand-new customers. A man like a Kumo shinobi, a lady with large breasts and a midriff-baring sweatshirt, and a boy of seventeen who looked remarkably like Fugaku Uchiha.

"Nice disguise," said the Uchiha. "Were you going for the town _lush_ or the town _whore_?"

"I was going for _different_!" the town lush retorted. "What are you, another Uchiha? In a village where they're all dead? Great, ANBU will _never_ find us now!"

Sensing they were becoming impatient, Ayame stepped in. "Hello there, may I take your order?"

The Cloud ninja opened his mouth to answer, but the girl kicked him under the table. "What's on the menu?" she asked innocently.

Sakura watched Sasuke intently, and when he didn't comment or even react she deduced that his sharingan was off. Not entirely smart, considering she was about to use him against Naruto. She created a quick genjutsu, nothing visual or detectable outright but subtle. Subtlety was the name of the game.

"Hey," Sasuke said, just as their waitress was finishing. "What's your name?"

"Umm, it's Ayame," the girl replied, blushing. Why hadn't she introduced herself?

"My name is Sasuke," he told her. "Sasuke Uchiha. I'll have the pork, and my friends will both have miso, please."

"Maa! Err, coming right up!" Ayame yelped, vanishing into the kitchen so fast Naruto wondered if she'd once been a kunoichi.

"Awww," cooed Naruto, "Sasuke made a fwiend! Isn't she _adoowable_?"

They said nothing in reply. Sasuke was trapped in his mind's eye, envisionings of a girl dominating his thouts for the first time in years. Sakura was too busy keeping up the genjutsu to say anything. Sasuke was sitting next to her, but weaving thoughts into the mind of a girl in a different room was draining her chakra quickly.

She was sad to give Sasuke up... but if he had to deal with her sleeping around, then fair was fair. Ayame came back with three bowls of ramen. She dished them out, but Sasuke stopped her before she could retreat again.

"You're..." Sasuke began, catching her eye. Ayame bobbled nervously, waiting for the customer to speak his mind.

"Yes?" she prompted.

"... Rather pretty," Sasuke finished, the words sounding both bitter and forced, yet extremely heartfelt.

"Oh!" Ayame exclaimed. "I- um, well, I- er- excuse me, I need to–!"

Naruto snorted with mirth, both at Sasuke's lovestruck gaze and Ayame's flustered disposition. Better yet, Sakura couldn't go after Sasuke if the bastard had a girlfriend! Well, unless she was a homewrecker... Naruto observed her discreetly, wondering how much of a barrier the polite ramen girl really was.

Just when he was about to eat his ramen, it was gone. Naruto sent his teammates a flat look. "Pranks are pranks, sure, but taking my ramen is over the line!" he hissed. "Which one of you did it?"

Sakura looked at him dully, her eyes glazed over with effort. "Whatever," she muttered. "Take mine, it tastes like horseradish and pig s*** anyways."

"Thanks!" Naruto slid the other miso order towards his place at the table, raised a spoon to dig in...

Swells of sand burst from the storage seals on his arms, jumping into the bowl of ramen and absorbing every drop with clinical efficiency. Naruto watched, mesmerized, until every last drop had been wiped away and the sand retreated to his body once more.

"Stupid broad," he wailed, causing Sasuke to shy away from him, "get your own goddamn ramen!"

An image of a petit, redheaded woman formed in an empty seat at the next table. She winked saucily, and when Naruto gave her the finger she burped in his face. Then, silently, Kushina's apparition vanished.

* * *

**This chapter is somewhat shorter than the others, but you've gathered that already. I don't think it matters too much. Now, about Shino being blind, I should probably explain that it's the conclusion I came to after the first time I read the manga. Dark glasses and all. He's got the beetles, I assume they can see for him. This chapter written, edited and posted from an iPad. That's all I wanted to clarify.**

**Review if you have any questions, comments, suggestions, whatever.**

_Up Next:_

_Rock Lee wakes up in the hospital, Sakura gets a stalker, and the Hokage decides that Team Seven needs to get out of his village._


	5. You Need A Life

**Aggressive Action**

_You Need A Life_

* * *

SO, YOU ACCIDENTALLY KILLED YOUR BEST FRIEND? YOUR GUIDE TO THE MANGEKYO SHARINGAN!

Property of: SHISUI UCHIHA_– don't you dare tough this, Itachi!_

**THE** mangekyo sharingan is a mutation in the Uchiha family's bloodline limit, the sharingan. It was first discovered by Madara Uchiha and his brother, Izuna Uchiha, in the first decade after Konoha's founding. Traditionally, accessing this ability requires the greatest sacrifice: the death of a loved one. This act accelerates the development of the sharingan in both eyes, and completely corrupts the chakra matrix of the dojutsu.

**BECAUSE** of its unstable nature, the mangekyo sharingan has a number of drawbacks. Its use requires more chakra than the sharingan, putting more strain on the optic nerve. In time, use of this dojutsu wears away regular eyesight, then sharingan eyesight, until the user is completely blind. It has been noted in the case of Kasumi Uchiha that a blind mangekyo sharingan can be transplanted into another host, provided the new host has a functional optic nerve. As well, many of the mangekyo ninjutsu are unrefined, and can cause great physical and psychological pain, although they do not outright destroy the eye in the way that kinjutsu such as Izanami do (see Appendix A). Great caution is advised.

**PRIMARY** among the mangekyo's abilities are ninjutsu, unlike the regular sharingan. **AMATERASU** is available to all users, and is classified as its own chakra nature (Blaze Release). Blaze techniques cannot be extinuished by water, and are difficult to control. As well, experienced mangekyo sharingan can perform **SUSANOO**, which forms a pliable, impenetrable chakra construct around the wielder. This has been noted to be extremely painful, and is ill-advised for any Uchiha.

**GENJUTSU** is an Uchiha domain, and the mangekyo provides an unlimited illusion. **TSUKIYOMI** can alter the experience of time passing by the target to a magnitude of 259'200 times. It can manipulate perception entirely, is completely unbreakable by modern genjutsu-deflection ninjutsu, and poses little difficulty to the average Uchiha. Furthermore, it puts very little strain on the optic nerve, and can be used with near-impunity.

**THERE** are many mangekyo techniques limited to one user. Very little data is available on these, and experienced help is advised in identifying them. These include **KOTOAMATSUKAMI**, of Shisui Uchiha; **OMOIKANE**, of Izuna Uchiha; **GRAVITY RELEASE**, of Ryoga Uchiha; and **KAMUI**, presumably of Obito Uchiha. Others are unconfirmed.

**SPECULATION** on the nature of the mangekyo sharingan reveals that surgery to combine two pairs of them would create a new, as-of-yet unnamed bloodline limit. It is unknown what this would accomplish, beyond defying the decay of the optic nerve as in the case of the mangekyo. This theoretical procedure would consume one set of sharingan, and would stand a better chance of success if the two eyes were similar, perhaps those of siblings or a parent and child. Whatever the case may be, this possibility is highly unethical and should not be attempted under any circumstances.

**ALL KNOWN MANGEKYO SHARINGAN USERS:**

•Madara Uchiha

•Izuna Uchiha

•Ryoga Uchiha

•Takiri Uchiha (unconfirmed)

•Kasumi Uchiha

•Yoshino Hagane (see Appendix B)

•Kakashi Hatake (see Appendix B)

•Shisui Uchiha

_That's me! Yo Itachi, Kotoamatsukami is a—_

(The rest is smeared over with thick pen, and will never be legible again.)

* * *

With great trepidation, Rock Lee opened his eyes. At first, the ceiling above his head was blurry and unfocused, but over time it sharpened into the familiar tiled background of Konoha General. He groaned, rubbing his eyes with one hand and trying to remember what had happened. There was a fight… with a cute girl, who kicked his ass… something about blue… and then his forehead hurt.

Sitting upright sharply, Lee ran a finger over his forehead. There was a thick layer of tenser bandages wound around his face, covering the source of the biting pain. When his finger ran itself over the centre of the wound, Lee groaned in agony and lay back. At this rate, Neji was going to get ahead in training and he'd always be behind his rival. Gai would be ashamed of him, and he'd have to do what Gai did and study taijutsu under the Order of Sobek in the mountains of Lightning Country until he could _tie_ with Neji in a sparring match! Lee's heart rate spiked dangerously.

The door opened, admitting a nurse. She picked up the clipboard at the end of the bed and wrote down that he was awake.

"Does it hurt?" she asked, not looking at him.

"Yes."

"Where?"

"My forehead."

"Describe the pain, please."

"Stabbey. Like I'm being stabbed. Is there something you can do about that?"

The nurse looked up at him. "That kid on your team, Neji, he was quieter about all of this. Just saying." This was mainly because Neji was in no position to be saying anything at all, and would remain that way for the time being.

The appropriate response was typically "I will be more [insert adjective here] than Neji, or else run a hundred laps around Konoha with raw steak tied to my legs while every Inuzuka in the village sets their dog on me!", because Gai said that it helped charge your resolve. But blurting that out would be counterproductive, so instead he remained silent.

"Mmmkay, says here you have a severe concussion," the flabbergastingly ignorant nurse read, simultaneously checking her nails and wondering if her boyfriend remembered that it was their anniversary. "You're going to be confined to the hospital until one of the doctors says you're good to go. Oh, and you have a present." She tossed a brown package on Lee's lap. It looked like it had been wrapped by an exceptionally clever dolphin.

Lee waited until the nurse left before he tore the wrapping off. Inside was a blue jumpsuit, a grey Konoha headband, and a charred lock of pink hair. There was a note, too.

_'I like the colour blue more than green. It makes you look more like a dangerous taijutsu master than a tree.'_

It was the most thoughtful gift anyone had ever given him, save the eyebrow tweezers from his mother for Lee's last birthday. This outfit would see more use, too. Lee emitted a noise of pure excitement and gratitude, and promptly passed out from exertion. The nurse in the hallway was chatting with a coworker, and didn't hear the equipment beeping in his room until it was almost too late.

XXX

"Ayame! Ayame, you remember that guy who was in here a few days ago?"

"Oh! Hello Naruto, I didn't see you come in! Yes, I– I remember him. When did you see him?"

"Oh, Sasuke is a friend of mine. We've known each other for _years_!"

"That's nice... Say, do you know where he lives?"

"Yeah, it's in this apartment building a few blocks down from that old health food store. I don't go there much, 'cause they don't sell ramen, but Sasuke goes there to buy tomatoes."

"Tomatoes?"

"Yup! Sasuke just devours tomatoes like nobody's business. I think he goes through a package of them every other day. It really puts a dent in his paycheck, but he says it's worth it."

"Kin– I mean, good to know!"

"Hey, why do you want to know where that guy lives, anyways?"

"Oh, no reason. No reason in particular."

"Well, okay. I just wanted you to know that if you ever see him again, make sure you knock really loudly on his door and tell him it's you."

"Those are oddly specific instructions, Naruto. Why?"

"Dunno. Sakura wanted me to pass it on."

"The nice girl who you keep asking out on dates? That's nice. Can I take your order?"

XXX

Sakura whistled happily as she left Naruto, feeling pleased with herself. Jashin normally disapproved of taking revenge without blood being spilled, but since there were people she wasn't allowed to kill, her god had taken an exception. Sakura felt honoured that Jashin would approve, and so she enacted the next stage of her plan.

Now there was another thing bothering her. For the past few minutes, she'd sensed a someone following her, and not very well either. She took a few more turns, trying to shake them, but whoever it was had enough ninja training to stay on the tail of someone who knew they were there. Just to test her theory, the Jashinist casually passed through a surplus weapons' supply store, pretending to inspect a wakizashi.

Another woman wandered up, standing behind Sakura and waiting for her to turn around.

"Why are you getting a sword?" she asked, almost playfully. "Ninjutsu is more deadly, and you can do better with shuriken."

"This is Suna steel," Sakura replied, pretending she wasn't reading the tag on the handle. "It can channel chakra more efficiently than the Konoha-grade trench knives, and has a three-year-warranty–"

"– in case of damage outside of combat, yes," the purple-haired kunoichi finished. "Cut that out brat, I wasn't born yesterday."

With a flourish of her cloak to hide her movements, Sakura ripped the sword out of its display and held it at the older ninja's throat.

"Were you?" she taunted.

The kunoichi leaned back, away from the blade, and kicked Sakura in the ribs. She pretended to be hurt, dropping the blade and staggering away down the aisle.

"Yeah, you better run!" Anko hollered after her.

_'Man, I gotta stop getting my jollies from scaring little brats,' _she thought miserably. _'Iruka is more fun to get the drop on anyways.'_

Plan on track, Sakura wandered out the back door of the store, down the alleyway, and out into a plaza on the other side. Still, the chakra signature of her stalker lay just at the edge of her perception. She turned and started walking directly towards the person, reaching into her robes for her tanto and smiling wickedly. Whoever was stalking her, their day was about to get a whole lot shittier.

"Nyaaa!" cried a high, nasal voice. "Who're you looking for?"

Sakura sort of recognized him as Konohamaru Sarutobi, the Hokage's grandson and someone she gave zero f***s about. He was currently flanked by a solemn looking boy with a bad cold and a girl with orange hair tied up to give those birds a new home. All three of them were staring at her.

"Piss off, kiddies," she muttered, cursing that of all people, she had to run into Konohamaru. The Hokage would rip her eyeballs out and feed them to the dogs if Konohamaru died. He'd chain her to the Hokage monument, and every day that monkey summon of his would bite a chunk out of her, letting it regenerate every night. Her inner personality snickered, pointing out that there was a bigger fish to fry.

"I will protect my friend from you!" the kid shouted, pointing a finger threateningly and narrowing his eyes.

"Oh, so the creeper is a friend of yours?" she deduced. Sakura filed the information away for later.

"Here is my defence! Centrefold technique!" Konohamaru used Naruto's pervert jutsu, inflating himself a few feet and adding breasts and subtracting clothing. The girl's lips were grotesquely inflated, and the crotch lacked any detail, but other than that it was a decent facsimile.

"Idiot," Udon said. "She's a girl. Girls don' like other girls."

"You don't know s***-all," Sakura shot back at him. "Kai."

Moegi rolled her eyes and slapped the male-again Konohamaru on the back of the head. "Sorry, lady," she told Sakura. "He's just trying to impress that girl."

"Who?" asked the Jashinist, as Konohamaru rubbed the back of his head and tried to look contrite.

"It's–"

A special jonin with dark glasses and a bandana replaced all three of them with logs, whisking the kids away to somewhere else. The stalker's presence also disappeared, dashing Sakura's plan to sacrifice whoever it was to Jashin.

"Hokage wants you," the man said.

XXX

Team Seven stood in a row, all of them slouched over and yawning. Kakashi was running late, yet again.

The door opened, and Kakashi was thrown bodily into the room. An ANBU agent stood in the doorway, waiting patiently for the meeting to finish.

"Excellent, Agent Rat," Sarutobi said. "Thank you for gracing us with your presence, Kakashi. Now, I've been recieving a good many reports about this team."

"Hn?"

"Oh, some good, some bad." The Hokage shrugged minutely. "Whatever the case, many have suggested that you four are prepared for missions outside the village."

"Three," Kakashi corrected automatically, standing up with painful slowness.

"No, you too are prepared to leave Konoha," said Sarutobi humorously. "Allow me to rephrase my original concerns: the four of your are extraordinarily competent, yet complaints force me to eject you from my village. Team Seven is taking a C-Rank mission, and you are leaving immediately."

There were complaints.

"I can't go!" wailed Naruto. "I haven't eaten ramen in days. Days! The sand keeps eating it, and then the Ginger Bitch laughs at me!"

"Language," Sarutobi ordered. "I cannot help you, so perhaps you should see it as an exercise in self control."

"Self control? Self control is _not killing her_!"

Kakashi was more than a little desperate.

"Lord Hokage, you can't do this to me!" he whinged pitifully. "I have a wife– no, I have friends! And my books! Who's going to watch the memorial stone while I'm away? Who will keep Gai in check? The women in this town will all-"

"Praise me for engineering your absence," Sarutobi interrupted. "I have given you a great deal of leeway in these past years, but I am the Hokage. Team Seven is going on a mission. You will accompany them. This is only a C-Rank, so if there are any fatalities, I will hold you personally responsible."

Naruto raised a hand. "Umm, what if _he's_ the fatality?"

"I trust that won't happen," the Hokage said, a hint of steel in his voice.

Agent Rat looked over his shoulder. "The client is here, sir."

"You arranged this in advance?" Kakashi asked incedulously.

"Nonsense," Hiruzen rebuted. "Agent Rat, please retrieve the gear we set aside earlier." The ANBU nodded and left.

"This is ridiculous," Kakashi muttered. "You're treating me like a genin."

"I don't care," the Hokage said simply. "Do it."

"There's an old man with a limp coming," said Sasuke, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. "Client?"

"Who the fu-?"

"Imbeciles!" shouted Tazuna, who was leaning heavily on a cane to compensate for being completely intoxicated. Sasuke kind of admired the guy. It took real dedication to get so drunk at, what, nine in the morning? Judging by the massive travel satchel stuffed with scrolls and a few bottles of port, he was also probably carrying everything he owned on his back right now. While drunk, in the Hokage's office. Sakura was giving the man a strange look.

"Hey, who you callin' imbi-sills?" Naruto fairly screamed. Sakura smacked him over the head with the blunt end of her scythe, then gave Tazuna a measured dose of killing intent. The drunkard shuffled back a bit, but he was well and truly blasted enough to not notice the lunatic reaper out for his blood. Naruto rubbed his head reproachfully, then lunger at Sakura, who responded the way she always did...

In a flash, Sarutobi himself intervened. Naruto was pushed to the far end of the room by a metal staff, while Sakura was catapulted out the window. The Hokage looked at the window regretfully, probably calculating the repair costs, and then gave Sasuke a lump on the head for his troubles.

"Leave. Now. Get them out of my village, Hatake."

"Yessir."

XXX

If there was one thing Naruto had to say about Tazuna, it was that he was more annoying than Sasuke in his most emo, self-loathing of moments. The man just went on and on about what a great bridge-builder he was, and why Konoha couldn't get him a real ninja team to guard him on his way to building one of the biggest bridges in the Elemental Nations. Finally, just to shut him up, Naruto asked why this bridge was so important that he needed to hire ninja to guard it.

"Well, some highwaymen might try to attack us, see, or maybe bandits are waiting for me back home. I did make a few enemies," the man justified. "What are you complaining for, I paid you bastard ninja already."

"Hn," commented Sasuke. It seemed that this mission was doomed to be nothing but annoying and a waste of– wait, when was the last time it rained? It certainly wasn't this week, so why was there a puddle just lying about in the middle of the road like they were in Ame or something? Sasuke discreetly glanced at Kakashi, but the jonin was engrossed in not caring about anything. Naruto was trying to out-scream a professional alcoholic, and Sakura was praying. This required closing her eyes and bowing her head, so she was weaving around the road and bumping into everyone around her. Just him, then. Sasuke sighed, activating his mangekyo sharingan. When they were just nearing the puddle, right as the two men at the bottom prepared to spring their trap, he struck.

"Amaterasu," he said quietly, ignoring the vicious sting and the way his vision jolted as he did so. Maybe there was a way to only use one eye at a time. Being blind in the left eye wasn't such a bad deal, especially if the sharingan still worked. The two men were beginning to scream, and Kakashi was giving him a strange look with his one eye, so Sasuke quickly used an earth technique to slide a dirt lid over the hole in the ground. That was what it was, a hole, no water in sight. Evidently Amaterasu was overkill.

_'No kill like overkill,'_ he thought suddenly, and smiled slightly. The dying gasps of Gozu and Meizu, burned alive by the pinnacle of fire abilities, were completely muted.

Kakashi stared at Sasuke, who had turned on that godforsaken sharingan and was now smiling at nothing in particular. Dear lord, that kid gave him the creeps sometimes. He raised a hand to call for a halt.

"Sasuke, is there something you'd like to tell us?" he asked, trying his best not to cry with the unfairness of it all. _'Minato, were we this horrible to you? I'm so, _so_ sorry if I or Rin ever gave you a stroke by accident... That one time with Obito doesn't count.'_

"Perhaps," Sasuke replied.

"Elaborate."

"I smell blood," Sakura interjected randomly. "It's a bit like steak on a barbeque, more well done than I normally eat it, but definately human. _Cooking_ human?"

_'How do you know what human blood smells like?'_ Kakashi wanted to ask, before deciding that it was better if he didn't know.

"D'you prefer rare, Sakura?" Naruto pried hopefully.

"Are you asking 'cos you want to go on another date with you? I like meat alive and struggling, but rare's good."

"Sasuke, why can Sakura smell people who, apparently, recently burned to death?"

"I think one of them is still alive, sensei!" added Sakura. She dropped to her hands and knees and sniffed, trailing her nose along the ground like one of Kakashi's dogs. She crawled up to the edge of the illusory puddle and stopped confused.

"I might have just killed two ninja," Sasuke admitted.

"Might? _Might_?" There was a vein in Kakashi's forehead threatening to pop.

"They could still be in unimaginable pain," the genin suggested.

"Sensei, when is a puddle not a puddle?"

"Sakura, now is not the time for puns. I'm trying to figure out–"

"When it's a f***ing genjutsu!"

Kakashi blurted out an A-Rank anti-genjutsu technique, and the puddle promptly transformed into a flat stretch of ground. He regarded Sakura, unimpressed. "So, a puddle isn't a puddle when it's a mirage? Congratulations, I believe you've passed science class."

"It's a genjutsu, I'm sure of it!" Sakura cried. "Look, I'll prove it!." She marched a circle over where the puddle used to be, but the dirt held. That is, until she jumped experimentally, and fell into a hell where the fire didn't burn with light.

"You neglected to mention that," Kakashi admonished. "Did you think we weren't going to notice a hole with three corpses in it?"

"I'm– ERRAGAH!– still AAARGH!– alive, you bastAAAARGH—!" screamed Sakura.

"Would eviscerating you with a chidori while you lie down there help with that?" her sensei asked innocently.

"F*** YOU! SWEET JASHIN, THIS PAIN IS ECSTASY!"

XXX

Elsewhere, a place where the sanity levels were also dropping to lethal levels, Naruto was arguing with Tazuna. The man simply refused to admit that Wave was a backwater country with no ninja, no ramen, and no Hokage. Tazuna's only rational argument was that only Konoha had a Hokage, to which Naruto replied with a rude hand gesture, and from there it snowballed downhill.

"Wave is the pinnacle of civilization!" Tazuna proclaimed, swatting at Naruto with the bottle and missing spectacularly.

"Konoha has ninja!" Naruto countered, as if this made the Leaf's superiority self-evident. In a way it was, because that pretty much guaranteed Konoha independence for as long as it existed. That was the origin of the expression 'Will of Fire', though it had been twisted by Tobirama Senju's PR Department into meaning something else entirely. The man wasn't as revered as his older brother, but you had to admire his administration. One of the perks of staffing your offices with ninja.

"Wave Country never, never shall be slaves!" rebutted Tazuna, citing his national anthem. It was unfortunate that the proud people of Wave had actually been enslaved by various nations and tyrants since the era of warring states, and it was the fate of the poor people to be shackled by the more powerful for the next hundred years or so, after which they would come to possess a chakra weapon powerful enough to wipe out the modern world, and a joint team from Leaf and Mist ended up eradicating the entire country.

"You're disgusting!" Naruto said. "Have some pride in yourself!"

"_You_ are wearing orange. What kind of ninja wears orange, anyways? Help with those missions where you have to stand out?"

"This is our first mission outside Konoha," Naruto told him, embarrassed. "I don't even remember why I wear orange." Little did he know that he wore orange because of a freak accident thirteen years ago. Minato Namikaze decided to try marijuana, and the resulting haze had him teleporting to random places for reasons he didn't quite understand himself. One of those places was highly irradiated, and shortly thereafter a doctor declared all of his children would be so malformed from birth that surviving for longer than a day was quite unlikely. Minto, whose distrust of doctors was almost as legendary as his love for Yakitori and buxom Kiri women, decided to ignore the man's advice. Naruto was born healthy, if a bit premature, but no paediatrician or psychiatrist ever diagnosed him with the variety of ADHD-flavoured disorders that ran in the Uzumaki clan.

(Somewhere in Rice Field Country, as it was still called, a girl with hair as red as the day is long sneezed suddenly, making her scalpel shudder in her grip. The man on the operating table, who was almost finished having a metal tube implanted into his right arm, was now bleeding dangerously. She wished Orochimaru had given her enough anesthetic and anticoagulant to finish everyone, but they ran out disturbingly often.

To compound that, a man somewhere else with equally red hair and a similar disposition sneezed on his wife, who looked perplexed enough that he apologized. Everyone within earshot, believing they had witnessed a god say 'Sorry, angel!', experienced epiphanies about their jobs, marriage and religion.)

"You're still rank amateurs then," Tazuna judged. "Pity, I was expecting _real_ ninja–"

Naruto lunged, murder in his heart and a kunai in his hands. Tazuna stumbled back, a modicum of fear breaking through his facade of indifference, but it was too late...

A barrier of sand sent Naruto tumbling back. He was repelled onto his rear a few feet away, skidding back from the surprised Tazuna. He quickly pushed himself up, ignoring the way the seal rumbled, and was immediately hoisted off his feet. The sand was coherent now, glued by will alone into the form of a woman twice his height. Naruto instantly recognized her as the Ginger Bitch, despite the fact that she was now made of sand. She opened her mouth, and a ferocious humming noise came out as she tried to say something to him. Vibrating vocal chords evidently only worked if they were made of flesh.

"I can't understand you!" he shouted, a tad unnecessarily, and the Ginger Bitch paused. Slowly, she mouthed 'Are you crazy?' to the suspended genin, who snorted in response.

"Look, I haven't eaten in a week, and it's your damn fault!" He poked her in the chest with a finger, which she looked down at with lazy amusement. "I mean, what else was I supposed to eat?"

'Thanks for the ramen,' the Ginger Bitch mouthed. Then, she slapped him. Being slapped by a hand made of sand was a weird feeling, Naruto thought. It was more like being stroked by sandpaper than anything.

'You are a pig!' she hollered silently, shaking Naruto by his lapel. 'Who taught you manners?'

XXX

Meanwhile, back in the depths of Kakashi's personal hell, Sasuke was sitting on a rock he'd created with an earth technique, and Sakura was trying to haul herself out of the flaming hole with Amaterasu consuming her. She was down to a naked skeleton, her scythe somehow resisting the black flames but her cultist robes being less immortal than herself. Kakashi considered the logical next step. Naruto was watching Tazuna, so that front was safe, but how to rescue Sakura? He could pull her out himself, but something (the memories of a shadow clone) told him that trying personally would doom him as well. Kakashi was also reasonably certain that his bones wouldn't move by themselves, so that left Sasuke.

"Put her out," he ordered.

"No."

"Do it!"

"Why?"

"I am your mission commander and sensei, and you will do as I say. Get rid of that stuff."

"No, you're not."

"Pardon?"

Sasuke gave Kakashi a look that could make a mountain whimper. "You. Are. Not. My. Sensei."

"Aww, is that any way to treat your– DAMNIT KID, I'M TRYING!" he pleaded, as Sasuke tried to take his head off with a fist augmented with violet chakra. "You want me to be a sensei? Then here! Current Dragon Technique, water style, B-Rank ninjutsu." He threw out all forty-four hand seals as fast as humanly possible, not even facing Sasuke, and said, "I am now your teacher. Turn off that... whatever it is."

Sasuke's mangekyo sharingan faded, and now that his eyes were their original shade Kakashi could see the unbridled happiness glinting in their depths. It was a look he'd seen many times before. On himself. On Anko. On Ibiki. It was a look that meant someone was going to get their shit messed up, and you were going to enjoy every second of it.

_'What have I done?'_

XXX

Zabuza was starting to get worried after twenty minutes without contact, so he tentatively sent Haku in to observe the fight between the Demon Brothers and the jonin/genin team from Konoha. Surely the two chunin hadn't lost already, because it wasn't like they were rank amateurs, and one jonin versus two high chunin was ever so slightly in the chunin's favour. Especially with the level of coordination that Gozu and Meizu had. The two spent a every waking hour with one hand chained to each other, was it any wonder that they could fight perfectly in sync? Now, if only people would stop accusing them of being in a relationship...

Haku arrived a few minutes later, his Kiri ANBU mask swapped out for a casual civilian disguise, this time as the daughter of a middle-class civilian. No, he was male, thank you for asking, but was it any business of _yours_ if he happened to enjoy dressing up as a girl? Was there anything wrong with that? Okay, maybe the conservative lifestyle of his late parents had been a bit constricting, and Zabuza's lack of experience in the area gave him the freedom to do... _things_...

He frowned.

There wasn't a fight in quite the way he'd been expecting. Instead, there was a short blond kid being slapped around by a woman made of sand—

Two minutes later, after Haku's brain rebooted, he was prepared to accept that. He was even prepared to accept that there was another genin chasing Sharingan Kakashi around with a dragon made of water, unlikely as it was.

But it was the hole that did him in. The pit that he had helped them dig for the ambush, which was now filled with ungodly black fire that leapt up like a bonfire and scorched the earth almost three metres away. It looked positively demonic.

Then, a skeleton armed with a bloody sickle tried to climb out of the hole. It's bony fingers wrapped blindly around the lip of the hole, but the flaming dirt crumbled under its fingers and it toppled back into hell again.

Hell. That hole was a hole to hell. That's what had happened, Gozu and Meizu had fallen through a portal into the Dark World of the Damned, and now their restless souls were trying to escape from the eternal bonfire. Nervous sweat broke out along Haku's back. What if they remembered that time he caught them making out on camera and wanted revenge? Oh God oh God oh God...

XXX

Kakashi looked away from his pursuer to see a young woman with black hair and a haori standing by the side of the road. As she watched, her expression grew more and more petrified, until finally she shrieked (a little more like a young woman than a little girl, he had to admit) and ran smack into Tazuna. She eyed him for a split second, then screamed shrilly again and ran off the way she'd came.

At least the girl had some sense.

* * *

**You may be wondering, why am I only censoring Sakura when she swears? The answer is, it's because she cusses more than everyone else put together, and I feel like it does... something.**

_Up Next:_

_Is Team Seven physically capable of leaving the house without causing an international incident? Would you be reading this if the answer was 'yes'?_


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